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Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

itnews.com.au

11–20 of 238 posts

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#11
post #2

Does this just boil down to faster BSB/account number transfers between banks? I feel they're a little to late to the party for PayPal-like payments to a email or number.

Banking in ANZ is light years ahead of the US. Why on Earth would you want to use a potentially malicious rent-seeking third-party when you could send it directly bank to bank account for free? Looks like this is adding a convenience numbers/mapping to addresses and speeding the transfer time, which is welcome. Though I appreciated the nightly clearance because on a few occasions it gave me a chance to change the amo…

> Banking in ANZ is light years ahead of the US.

And light years behind some other countries.

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#12
This sounds like the swedish product "swish" which is immensely popular. Nobody does bank transfers between people, everybody transfers to your mobile number. So far I think there are no fees for personal use, either, although they said it would come later a few years ago. Transfers are of course instant and you can see the recipients name before you send the money, which is a great pro compared to a bank transfer to an opaque number.

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#14
post #4

Did I just read that they spent a billion dollars on it?

Probably collectively. And has someone who has worked for Australian banks it is probably on the cheap side. Many of the core systems that needed upgrading are old and there isn't necessarily the people around who worked on them. And so there are a lot of costs that go into upgrading.

It just seems absurd that it should be so complicated and expensive to build a system which on a basic level is just about maintaining a large table of numbers (the ledger of bank account balances) and doing simple arithmetic on it. And I say this as someone who develops banking systems for a living.

I think/hope the banking and financial sector in the future will be much more lean and optimized, both in terms of systems and management.

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#15
post #2

Does this just boil down to faster BSB/account number transfers between banks? I feel they're a little to late to the party for PayPal-like payments to a email or number.

Yeah, the basic idea of it is faster payments + the ability to transfer to an email address/phone number/ABN. The value is in it being supported by all the various banks and being instant, so you can just log into your banking app and instantly transfer to someone's account using only their email address, for example. Source: I work on the account resolution service that is part of this.

Interesting. I am one of (what I assume to be) a very small subset of people that manged to enter their email address before there was any input validation. (my account is with one of the big four). Despite using internet banking my registered email address ends with @127.0.0.1

Would this prevent me receiving payments?

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#16
post #2

Does this just boil down to faster BSB/account number transfers between banks? I feel they're a little to late to the party for PayPal-like payments to a email or number.

Yeah, the basic idea of it is faster payments + the ability to transfer to an email address/phone number/ABN. The value is in it being supported by all the various banks and being instant, so you can just log into your banking app and instantly transfer to someone's account using only their email address, for example. Source: I work on the account resolution service that is part of this.

I presume the identifier is only usable to receive payments not to pull payments? Why does it need to be a phone number or email. Doesn’t it just need to be a unique string?

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#17
post #2

Does this just boil down to faster BSB/account number transfers between banks? I feel they're a little to late to the party for PayPal-like payments to a email or number.

Here in Australia, bank transfers are free between banks, but can take a couple of days to clear sometimes (same bank is instant). Heard horror stories elsewhere, but pretty good customer experience here in AU IMHO.

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#18
post #12

This sounds like the swedish product "swish" which is immensely popular. Nobody does bank transfers between people, everybody transfers to your mobile number. So far I think there are no fees for personal use, either, although they said it would come later a few years ago. Transfers are of course instant and you can see the recipients name before you send the money, which is a great pro compared to a bank transfer to…

Just like the Norwegian VIPPS. It literally means "in an instant", somewhat cheerfully.

Re: Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

#20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the basic idea of it is faster payments + the ability to transfer to an email address/phone number/ABN. The value is in it being supported by all the various banks and being instant, so you can just log into your banking app and instantly transfer to someone's account using only their email address, for example. Source: I work on the account resolution service that is part of this.

Interesting. I am one of (what I assume to be) a very small subset of people that manged to enter their email address before there was any input validation. (my account is with one of the big four). Despite using internet banking my registered email address ends with @127.0.0.1 Would this prevent me receiving payments?

Ha, that's interesting - validation and normalisation is the responsibility of the banks so would depend on whether the bank of the person doing the lookup accepts it as a valid email address
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