The New Payments Platform for Australia is now three months into the build phase, and "still on schedule for the second half of 2017," Paul Lahiff, independent chair of the NPP Steering Committee, has told Banking Day."We moved out of design and elaborated what we want SWIFT to build at the end of July," Lahiff said."SWIFT is now building it. All the participants are building it," he said.SWIFT, the international payments cooperative, and IT vendor Fiserv signed the contract in late 2014 to build the NPP, a collaborative endeavour supported by more than a dozen banks to develop new infrastructure for low-value payments in Australia.Lahiff said the "first application or overlay, the 'initial convenience service', has been settled. We'll announce that in late October."All the other applications are up to the participants and what they think works for their customers."Asked if any banks were dragging the chain (something which ultimately dragged down the Mambo project in 2011), Lahiff said: "no, we are all moving in concert."