NAB has missed the Reserve Bank’s deadline for offering the PayTo service to its customers and only 53 organisations are live with the service almost a year after it was launched. PayTo was developed by NPP Australia, a subsidiary of Australian Payments Plus, as an up-to-date and more user-friendly version of consumer direct debits. AP+ sees the real-time mandate payment service eventually playing a role in a range of corporate payments as well. When it was launched in June last year, only six banks were ready to offer the service to their customers (Commonwealth Bank among them) and six payment service providers were offering merchants access. The Reserve Bank has been critical of what it sees as banks’ tardiness in implementing payment system innovation and it was not happy with the industry’s lack of readiness to offer PayTo. Last year, the RBA’s head of payments policy, Ellis Connolly, said the RBA had been in contact with ANZ, NAB and Westpac and had given them until the end of April this year to get the service up and running. Connolly said the RBA expected the industry to implement the NPP roadmap and was encouraging all participants to deliver PayTo no later than April 2023. An AP+ spokesperson confirmed to Banking Day that 53 organisations are now live with the PayTo service. That number includes authorised deposit-taking institutions and third parties offering payment initiation services. That means only about half of all ADIs are live, which is well below the RBA’s expectations. Among the big banks, ANZ made PayTo available for all retail and commercial accounts on April 21. Westpac confirmed that PayTo was being made available to all the group’s consumer customers, across all its brands, from Sunday April 30. NAB executive for transaction banking, Jonathan Adams, told Banking Day: “We have completed the build required for PayTo and are currently doing extensive testing prior to launch to ensure we deliver a secure, reliable and high-quality experience for customers. “Because we see PayTo as the future of payments in Australia, we have made the decision to build PayTo on our upgraded could-native payments infrastructure to ensure the new solution will be resilient, reliable and support high volumes. We share the RBA’s ambition to modernise banking processes and we remain firmly committed to helping customers access new, simple and digital real-time payment experiences.” Luke Fossett, the general manager of payment services company GoCardless Australia and New Zealand said the payments industry is keen to develop opportunities using PayTo but recognises that it is a big change for banks. “We are not far away,” he said. Fossett said the online authorisation process and the ability to track and control payment arrangements will give consumers a much better experience of mandate payments. AP+ has said consumers will have a high level of visibility and control over their payment arrangements, with the ability to view, authorise, pause or cancel payment agreements. Fossett predicts that current direct debit arrangements will be obsolete in three to five years, as long as PayTo delivers on its promise. He also predicts that once consumers get