Westpac and ANZ are beginning to widen access to the New Payments Platform, though their readiness has fallen short of suggestions the NPP would be accessible to customers of these two banks by Friday of last week.The take-up of the NPP system "has been less than earlier industry projections," Philip Lowe, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, told a parliamentary committee on Friday.Since the system was launched in February, 1.8 million people have registered a PayID, a rise of 200,000 over the last two months, suggesting the ramp-up is tapering off."This partly reflects the fact that a number of the major banks have been slow to make the new system available to all of their customers. They are now making it available, so we expect take-up to increase," Lowe said.The absence of Westpac and ANZ when the NPP opened up enrolment in PayID has confined the good news stories on real time payments to smaller banks."In the first five months of the NPP going live, we processed four per cent of payments through the network," Melos Sulicich, chief executive of MyState Financial said on Friday.Sulicich said this represented more than ten times MyState's market share of customers' deposits, based on APRA data.Paul Ranson, chief executive of Bank of us, another Tasmanian-based ADI, told Banking Day the real time payments experience was "missing ANZ and Westpac. Until you get more participants, the NPP's Osko overlay can't do much."ANZ has withdrawn access to its "Pay to mobile" service and in recent days begun to more widely promote enrolment in PayID, though its website still advises that PayID "is available to business customers and is coming soon for individual/personal customers."Liberal MP Trevor Evans on Friday asked RBA officials: "I put to you; there are claims that the major banks have been deliberately slow to roll out the new payments platform because they're afraid their customers will leave them when they are able to switch more easily or more easily become aware of new offers in the market."Michelle Bullock, assistant governor of the RBA responded: "The banks that haven't implemented yet are feeling the pressure from their customers and they have been trying very hard to catch up."She said "the main reason for the slowness, at least for a couple of them, is simply that their [investment] turned out to be more complicated than they thought, and they had problems with service providers. "They had many, many years to get on top of this and so to discover, as we were going live, that they weren't ready, was a bit disappointing really."There was in fact a view that, if two major banks weren't ready to go, then no-one should go. The fact that the system launched without two major banks was a big signal to these banks: 'Pull your socks up because you've got to get on board with this, and we're not waiting for you'. "I think that's a very good message. If we're always waiting for the slowest participant, we'll be