NPP Australia’s six-monthly NPP Roadmap has been published here. Katrina Stuart, NPP Australia’s Head of Engagement, said the capabilities outlined in the roadmap takes the platform’s potential beyond simple domestic credit transfers.
“When we updated the Roadmap in March this year, we revealed PayTo as the name of the Mandated Payments Service. Since then, we have seen a great deal of discussion and engagement in the market with significant progress across more than 100 participating financial institutions preparing for the service when it becomes available from mid-2022.
“As part of this initiative, all directly connected NPP participating organisations are required to upgrade their NPP infrastructure before the end of 2021, and by the end of June 2022 all NPP participating financial institutions will be required to enable their payer customers to authorise new PayTo agreements and process associated payments,” said Katrina.
PayTo is described as foundational capability that will enable a broad range of use-cases and provide a springboard for future innovation. In coming weeks, NPP Australia will share more details of these potential use-cases via its Linkedin page, including as an alternative to direct debit, ecommerce and eInvoicing, corporate payments and QR codes.
The Roadmap also provides an update on preparations for delivering inbound international payments on the NPP. The ability to flag a payment as a cross-border transaction and include data such as the full legal account name of the sender and identifiers such as date of birth means the NPP will support faster cross-border payments as well as be more effective in addressing financial crime.
Off the back of rapid QR code uptake during the COVID19 pandemic, NPP Australia is enhancing its current NPP QR code standard to cater for loyalty information and will publish the updated standard later this year. Work also continues to support the processing of bulk payments on the NPP as participating financial institutions look to migrate existing Direct Entry transactions over to the NPP, in anticipation of the likely retirement of the legacy Direct Entry system at some point in the future.
As always, the roadmap includes updated numbers relating to the growing use of the NPP. There are now more than 76 million accounts able to make or receive NPP payments and the platform now processes an average of 2.8 million transactions a day. Close to 31 per cent of all account-to-account credit transfers are occurring via the NPP. There are 8.7 million registered PayIDs, a 60 per cent increase since the same time last year with 250,000 new PayID registrations on average being added every month.