The banking industry sketched out its vision for the collaborative development of a payments platform that will foster the supply of a real-time payments service to most households and businesses yesterday.The Australian Payments Clearing Association published a document that sets out the proposed operating model, business architecture, governance and funding principles for what it says will be a "new payment system".APCA's work over recent months has been in response to agitation from the Reserve Bank of Australia for banks to overcome a history of lethargic investment in the payments platform, and to speed up and improve the quality of many routine payments.The model laid out by APCA proposes:-- A central clearing utility that will be owned and governed by a newly created mutual organisation. This will adopt an open access hub model.-- The use of external service providers for operational services.-- An overlay of competing, commercial services to be laid on top of the hub.-- Standardised access arrangements to be developed for other payment schemes and services on "equitable terms".-- Real-time settlement of payments across a settlements hub operated by the Reserve Bank of Australia.APCA proposes that the first service available on the new platform will be a "convenience service" optimised for mobile payments. This would be offered on a commercial basis and "is intended to compete directly with other payment services."APCA's Real-Time Payments Committee wrote that it "anticipates that multiple overlay services will develop over time, and may be commercial and competitive in nature."It said that "other approved schemes, hubs and services that wish to use the basic infrastructure could do so on an equivalent basis to the initial convenience service and it is expected these will evolve independently in the future."APCA said that "the basic infrastructure will focus on inter-ADI activity, leaving maximum scope for diverse end user services to develop over and around it."APCA said the infrastructure "will be developed as a new system [to] minimise the risk and impact to the efficient operation of existing payment systems.""It will also allow the new system to be built for the long term. "It should offer the medium-term opportunity, if ADIs so choose, to transition away from [the] existing basic low-value payments infrastructure [consisting] of cheques and direct entry.  "This could only occur after the new infrastructure has reached a critical mass of transactions."APCA said its model conformed to the criteria outlined by the RBA in November last year for assessing industry progress on payments reform.If the industry follows the plan set out yesterday then by the end of 2016 the basic infrastructure will offer a capability for ADIs, on a close to 24 by 7 basis, to initiate and receive a fast credit transfer using an ISO 20022 format (a financial message standard established by the International Organisation for Standards) between customer accounts. By the end of 2017, an ADI will have the ability "to identify an account at another ADI as the destination for a credit transfer using addressing information about the payee other than the account