Every six months, NPP Australia updates and publishes its roadmap outlining plans to enhance and extend the NPP’s capability. These plans are developed with the future needs of users of the wider payments ecosystem in mind as well as participating financial institutions, whether it be for retail P2P payments or more complex B2B payments.
The October 2020 version provides an update on the Platform’s uptake: almost all retail transaction bank accounts are now enabled for NPP payments, with 72 million accountholders able to make or receive NPP payments. In the past 12 months, approximately six million accounts were enabled and the platform is now processing an average 1.7 million transactions a day. More than 20 per cent of all account to account credit transfer are now being processed across the NPP. There are also more than 5.4 million registered PayIDs, up 36 per cent since the start of the year.
This latest version of the NPP Roadmap includes an update on the enablement of international payments via the platform.
The NPP international payments business service is an optional service for NPP Participants. The service enables Australian banks and international payment service providers to send international payments to an ultimate beneficiary or customer over the NPP as the final leg of an international payment coming into Australia.
The unique data capabilities of the NPP means information such as the full legal account name of the sender and additional identifiers such as date of birth can be carried from the country of origination all the way through to the receiving bank in Australia. This allows the receiving bank (as the bank of the ultimate payment beneficiary) to perform necessary due diligence and screening to meet their regulatory obligations and mitigate the risk for financial crime.
All NPP participating financial institutions are obliged to join the international payments business service and receive inbound international payments via the NPP by December 2022 as part of the platform’s annual infrastructure release. This requirement has been designated as a mandatory compliance requirement coming into effect in April 2023. It is anticipated that some financial institutions will choose to join the international payments business service over the next 12 months once they have completed the additional back office work required to enable screening of these payments.
Download the latest version of the NPP Roadmap here.