When the finance industry gathered at Fundtech's banking innovation conference in Sydney yesterday one hot topic was the likely winner of the contract to build the New Payments Platform. According to one well placed source, when the winner is announced in coming days it will be the consortium of financial messaging co-operative Swift and banking technology company Fiserv.Chris Hamilton, chief executive of the Australian Payments Clearing Association which is administering the NPP project, would not comment.NPP is intended to be a fast and flexible basic infrastructure for payments, allowing real-time settlements and able to support the transmission of data with payments, as well as link to a host of innovative "overlays".Bankers and boffins speaking at the conference said the NPP would allow them to take paper out of their payment services, use a variety of destinations (such as mobile phone numbers) for payment, and offer small business real-time payments.IBM payment subject matter expert, Peter Cheesman, said new revenue streams would come from the capacity to transmit more data with payments.ANZ general manager group payments, Nigel Dobson, agreed. He said: "The opportunity is to fill the data gap. You can take paper out of your business and your customers' businesses."That is the real reason for doing this."National Australia Bank general manager payments, Brett Watson, said NPP would allow banks to align payment services with the way customers "think about themselves". For example, payments would be transmitted between mobile phone numbers and not bank account numbers."Easier identification is a key component," Watson said.Bankers disagreed about the value of offering real-time settlements. Watson said he could not see it as a strong value proposition for customers but Dobson said business customers would value it.Dobson said: "We will focus on offering small business customers real time payments. We see lots of value there. Even large businesses will get value out of being able to use the NPP to digitize work flows."