Welcome to our new conversation with you – Views and News. This blog section of the APCA website is a new way for us to share insights, observations and points of view on payments system developments.
Past Opinion pieces from the APCA quarterly newsletter, Payments Monitor, have been uploaded into the Views and News archives to make it easier to follow your topic of interest. Our first new article appears below.
The goal-posts are shifting in new “real-time” payments systems.
It is safe to assume that if anyone, anywhere builds a new payment system, it will be real-time. That particular bar has been well and truly set by the UK’s faster payments system, followed up by the Paym P2P mobile solution that started there last year. All round the world, countries that don’t have a real-time alternative are working on how to get one. In the US, The Clearing House has announced its intention to develop a new real-time system, and the Canadian Payments Association is beginning its own debate on payment system modernisation. But the Brits are not resting on their laurels either – they have begun speccing out a new “world class payments system” as the next generation.
I think the key point to grasp here is that this frenzy of activity is no longer just about speed, it’s about automation. Here in Australia, the focus of the “New Payments Platform” is as much on rich data as on speed; specifically, the ability to seamlessly embed the payment into related economic activity by using a payload of data that travels with the value. From our perspective, that is the way the future lies.
This is a much harder debate to have. Somehow, payments have to be tailored to different contexts. A payment to buy a used car has different data needs and different information flows compared with a superannuation contribution. Looking around the world, I can’t find a system which has clearly “cracked” this problem – so maybe NPP will be first!
