settlement Archives

Fast payments – the difference a year makes

This time last year, I reported on the lodgement of an industry proposal to develop new real-time payments architecture for Australia. Rashly, I suggested that: - The Payments System Board would back the industry proposal (they did); - APCA would publish the proposal in full, so everyone knew what we were on about (we did); and - Industry collaboration on the new architecture would need to get going quickly if we were to have a shot at meeting the challenging timeframes set by RBA (and that happened too!)

UK payments system self-regulation under scrutiny

Last month, the UK government published a consultation paper on “Opening up UK payments”. According to the paper, “the self-regulation of financial services…has been discredited.” Say what? The world over, payments systems have been almost entirely self-regulated, so this is a big call. The evidence cited in the paper for this includes the LIBOR-rate fixing scandal and the failed attempt to eliminate UK cheque clearing. And of course, there is enduring rancor over the public bailout of UK banks during the global financial crisis.

Where does the money go?

So when you do a card payment, the shop owner can be certain she's getting paid because the card terminal does a real-time authorisation out of your card account ('value now'); but the payment system actually moves the money early the next business day morning or, for some payments, the morning after ('funds later'). Payments made on the weekend are the same in that value (authorisation) is still now, but the system only actually moves money between financial institutions on weekday mornings – which could be 2 to 4 days later. By the way, 'value now, funds later' is a lot better from the shop's perspective than 'promise now, funds later' – which is how a personal cheque works. In the good old days of branch banking, most people couldn't check their account balance outside business hours. Nowadays we all have much better information about our accounts through widespread ATM networks, internet banking and phone banking.

Building to last

I would like to borrow a theme from Jim Collins, the management researcher and writer. His two best-known works, Built to Last and Good to Great, are evidence-based studies of what makes commercial organisations outperform over the long term. APCA’s own core principles – our values, purpose, unique positioning, member benefit proposition and vision – were developed using the Collins framework. You can find them on our website. Collins has the luxury of something to measure: he looks at relative increase in total shareholder value of listed companies against competitive peers over long periods of time. Then he tries to work out how the top performers got there in the first place, and how they stay on top. These days there is plenty of debate over the validity of this method but its influence on corporate strategic thinking is undeniable. Unfortunately, neat quantitative measures of achievement are not generally available for payment systems. But the long-term, structural orientation of Collins’ work aligns well with broader payments system evolution: how does the industry build a payments system that will stand the test of time, and respond to the unknowable challenges of the future? It’s not about any one strategy or programme, but the overall structure, culture and orientation.