Dashboards around the banking industry are ready, if still dormant, waiting for the launch of the long anticipated New Payments Platform.
February 14, Valentines Day, is one date fancied - if not yet certain - for real time payments to become a reality across the Australian economy, based on Banking Day's ring around yesterday.
This date is a sentimental favourite: it happens to be the 52nd anniversary of the changeover of Australia's legal tender to dollars and cents from pounds, shillings and pence back in early 1966.
Its sentimental relevance may be overtaken, though, by a more practical need over at the NPP HQ to justify further delays on this project.
Optimists sitting around the NPP's decision-making tables at one point aimed for a debut of July 2017, a target later pushed back to the final quarter of last year.
By December 2017, the NPP messaging framed the launch window as "after Australia Day" - in common parlance, that means right about now.
NPP head office approval, once given, will turn a system tested and proven over many months into a mass market product.
Mark Worthington, CEO of Endeavour Mutual Bank said the bank would set the daily limit on NPP transfers "in the hundreds of dollars, enough to pay a tradesman."
Australia's financial institutions have traditionally taken responsibility for fraud, protecting consumers but also viewing fraud as a 'cost of doing business'.
The introduction of the New Payments Platform in Australia in a matter of weeks, if not days, has the potential to raise online fraud to a whole new level.
Richard Booth leads RSA's fraud and risk intelligence team in Asia Pacific and Japan. His team have had the chance to observe and research fraud patterns in other countries that have introduced real-time payments - notably the UK's faster Payments system.
Booth warns against complacency, saying the risks and challenges include:
• NPP won't eliminate fraud - it means faster fraud;
• financial institutions have traditionally taken responsibility for fraud risk but the NPP provides very little time for them to detect, and act upon, fraud; and
• other countries have experience with NPP-like platforms - and so do criminals.
"In the UK, by the middle of 2015, given the success they appeared to be achieving, with five billion payments made over the Faster Payments system, the decision was made to raise the cap from £100,000 to £250,000," Booth noted.
"Fraudsters were aware of the capabilities of the Faster Payments network but because of the landscape that the banks had implemented, they had not attacked it aggressively.
"It's no small consequence that the UK saw a 64 per cent rise in online fraud in calendar year 2015 over the 2014 year."
That is, once the limit was raised, RSA concluded, the value of money that could be compromised in a single attack suddenly met the criminals' own ROI targets.
And the fact that credit card numbers and online access details are traded openly in the internet in increasingly large numbers should be a worry for everyone, Booth warned.
In his experience, the attempt by fraudsters to create new accounts has far outpaced genuine adoption by customers in the early days of each new NPP-like system that has been implemented elsewhere.
"Our statistics show that - for the customers that we monitor - more than 55 per cent of fraud happens within ten days of a 'mule account' being opened. That is, accounts opened specifically for the purpose of routing money out of the country.
"On top of that, the majority of fraud happens on a brand new device - that is, any change in device by a customer."
Meanwhile, the NPP continues to ramp up. The Osko website states:
"We're working hard with over 55 financial Institutions to get it to you in early 2018."
So around half of all ADIs by number will launch in the first wave.
For operational and technology reasons, banks of smaller scale will link up with the NPP later in 2018 or even next year. ME is one bank in this category along with plenty of credit unions.
And into that mix will be some unexpected names, with talk of one or more of the Big Four not ready to go ahead.