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Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

itnews.com.au

21–30 of 238 posts

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

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sys…

It would be interesting to see a line item breakdown of that bill. I'd wager Oracle got a good $50 mill out of it (multi year).

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

#22
post #16

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.

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?

Yeah, only for receiving for now as far as I'm aware. As far as the reason it's restricted to certain types, I'm not sure - I'm contracting at a subcontractor of SWIFT so we're down the pipeline at the implementation end of things, not much visibility of business decisions.

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

#23
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…

Do people really transfer that much money between them on a regular basis? Everyone was touting this as the selling point for some of the crypto currencies, but I've always thought this is a non-issue. It's anecdotal but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I needed to transfer money to a person and not to a company.

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

#24

The two banks I’ve checked only allow you to use your mobile phone number or email address as your PayID (CBA and ING). When paying somebody, when you enter a recipient’s PayID, the bank confirms by showing the recipient account holder name. So in effect, they’ve just implemented a nationwide number-to-name lookup system. Separate to this, these two banks are pushing it hard. It feels like a land grab, since a single…

I suppose you either create multiple email addresses and assign one to each bank, or select a single bank to receive all your incoming payments and transfer to others as required (hopefully instantly).

I hope there'll be a way to delete a phone number or email address from the lookup system once it's added, so that you can move it to a different bank.

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

#25
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…

That was already possible in AU within the same bank.

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

#27
post #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.

Yeah bank transfers have always been reliable for me in sunny Australia but the issue pre-the NPP is the time it takes to transfer inter-bank and/or inter-credit union.

It’s particularly a ‘problem’ when your payments are delayed by public/bank holidays (especially those that only occur in a bank’s home state!) and feels particularly anachronistic compared to modern payment gateways.

Out of that $1bn AUD, probably half is on banker’s wages :P

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

#28
post #23
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…

Do people really transfer that much money between them on a regular basis? Everyone was touting this as the selling point for some of the crypto currencies, but I've always thought this is a non-issue. It's anecdotal but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I needed to transfer money to a person and not to a company.

In Australia I transfer money to mates at least once a week. Makes going to the pub or out to dinner with friends so much easier.

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

#29

The two banks I’ve checked only allow you to use your mobile phone number or email address as your PayID (CBA and ING). When paying somebody, when you enter a recipient’s PayID, the bank confirms by showing the recipient account holder name. So in effect, they’ve just implemented a nationwide number-to-name lookup system. Separate to this, these two banks are pushing it hard. It feels like a land grab, since a single…

Westpac appears to be limiting it to mobile phone number, not even allowing email addresses. I'm okay with giving out an email address, but not my personal phone number that people can call & buzz me any time of day or night. I'd rather just give out my BSB / Account Number.

I'm happy to see real-time payments, though. That will make it easier to bounce money around between savings accounts at different banks, no more waiting 3 days for EFT to clear.

[1] https://www.westpac.com.au/faq/payid-what-is-it/

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

#30
post #23
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…

Do people really transfer that much money between them on a regular basis? Everyone was touting this as the selling point for some of the crypto currencies, but I've always thought this is a non-issue. It's anecdotal but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I needed to transfer money to a person and not to a company.

I do it all the time. Split a bill in a restaurant, repay someone for tickets that they bought for me, getting my flatmates to pay their share of the electric bill, paying a flatmate back for stuff that they picked up in the shops for me, loan someone money, get a loan to someone repaid, settling up after losing some money at poker. That's all within the last few weeks.
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