Australia has publically launched its New Payments Platform (NPP), a landmark payments industry initiative set to revolutionize the way payments are made domestically.

NPP Australia selected SWIFT—a global member owned cooperative and the world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services—as the vendor to design, build, and operate the basic infrastructure of this payments industry initiative. SWIFT will also play a key role in operating the infrastructure for the NPP.

The NPP’s paradigm-shifting financial architecture has been designed and constructed to fundamentally improve how consumers, companies, and governments transact with one another.

Key features of the NPP include:

24/7 instant payments and real-time line-by-line settlement via the Reserve Bank of Australia;

PayID, new and easy way to link a financial account with an easy-to-remember identifier such as a mobile phone number, e-mail address or ABN for businesses;

Open access infrastructure that truly empowers innovation through competition; and

Overlay services framework that will provide new value services to Australian consumers, businesses and government.

Alain Raes, chief executive of EMEA & APAC, SWIFT, said the rollout of the NPP and the enablement of real-time payments is the most significant development in the Australian payments industry in decades and could have a more revolutionary impact on the economy than any previous payments system innovation. “SWIFT has supported the evolution of payments systems around the world for more than 40 years and is delighted to have played an important role in the creation and roll out of real-time payments in Australia,” Raes said.

NPP is a key component within SWIFT’s broader global instant payments strategy, which also includes the provision of an instant payments messaging service for the euro area. Launching in November 2018, to coincide with the launch of TARGET Instant Payment Settlement (TIPS), the euro real-time payments service commissioned by the Eurosystem, SWIFT’s new messaging service will allow instant payments to be made in euros across Europe through both TIPS and EBA CLEARING’s RT-1 instant payments system.

In the context of the Eurosystem’s 2020 vision, which envisages access to TARGET2, TARGET2 for Securities and TIPS through the Eurosystem Single Market Infrastructure Gateway (ESMIG), SWIFT’s instant payments strategy is committed to the future agenda of the Eurosystem, supporting customers as they move to meet this vision. 

The same SWIFT solution will provide customers with a single gateway to connect seamlessly to other instant payment systems in Europe and elsewhere. SWIFT, which currently connects 85 of the 149 High Value Payments systems in the world, including CHAPS in the UK, TARGET2 in Europe and the SWIFT India Domestic Services, also offers gateways to instant payments platforms in Hong Kong and in the United States.

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