Australia's New Payments Platform (NPP) Steering Committee has selected SWIFT to provide the infrastructure for its New Payments Platform (NPP) project, a new Australian fast payments infrastructure.
The new innovative platform will provide Australian businesses and consumers with a fast, versatile, data-rich payments system for everyday payments.
The NPP is being developed collaboratively by 12 leading financial institutions in Australia. It is the local industry’s response to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s strategic objectives on payments innovation, and implements the former Real Time Payments Committee’s proposal on innovation in the domestic payments system*.
There will be three main technology components to the solution developed by SWIFT for the Australian community:
1. The network – a Domestic Messaging Channel that enables participants to exchange a high volume of messages in-country, with low latency on a 24×7 basis;
2. The switch – a payments gateway that orchestrates clearing and settlement flows; and
3. The addressing database – a proxy addressing lookup service allowing payment routing based on personal identifiers such as a mobile phone number or email address.
Alain Raes, Chief Executive, of EMEA and Asia Pacific at SWIFT, says "Australia is one of a growing number of countries looking to implement new domestic payments systems in order to achieve faster and more cost-efficient payments. This is a significant first step for SWIFT in this space. We are very excited by the project and look forward to partnering with the community on this initiative."
Beyond Australia, SWIFT is now exploring how best to deploy these capabilities in a standardised way across multiple markets, generating economies of scale for its customers.