Chair of the New Payments Platform steering committee, Paul Lahiff, says the ghost of the failed Mambo payments project has made its presence felt more than once since he took on the role at the NPP.Mambo was a co-operative project of the Big Four banks, run by Bpay and designed to create an electronic addressing system to speed up business and consumer payments. By the time it was wound up in 2011 it had cost its participants an estimated A$200 million.Speaking at AB+F's Retail Financial Services conference yesterday, Lahiff said: "Before I took the role I had to be comfortable that we were not setting ourselves up to fail."The NPP was launched in June last year with the task of developing payments infrastructure that would allow for data-rich, real-time payments.Lahiff said he was confident about the current project because it had 17 participants and not four and because one of those participants, the Reserve Bank, had a "vital interest" in the outcome.He said the management of the project was much more open and transparent than Mambo and the goal was more clearly defined - to establish basic infrastructure and allow industry to build all the applications and overlays.The steering committee's goal is that by the end of 2016 businesses and consumers will be able to make payments in real time with "close to immediate" access for recipients.These payment functions will operate outside banking hours. Payments will include much more remittance information than currently permitted and the system will allow for payments to non-bank account destinations, including mobile phone numbers.Lahiff said the committee was down to a short-list of two system builders and expected to have a contract signed by August. The timeline requires that the system be built in 2015 to allow participants to do their testing and implementing during 2016."We aim to be operational towards the end of 2016," Lahiff said.He said the big difference between the NPP and similar systems overseas was that the NPP would only build the core infrastructure, leaving the development of service overlays to the market."What we observed with some other systems was that if you try to delineate the whole system you limit the functionality."