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Australia’s new real-time banking payments platform

183 points by adrian_mrd 9y ago

jakecopp 9y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  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 amount.
  - dorian-graph 9y ago
    > Banking in ANZ is light years ahead of the US. And light years behind some other countries.
    - mstibbard 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, who is the world leader in banking? Going from Australia to the UK felt like going back in time 20 odd years.
      - dorian-graph 9y ago
        I'm not sure about world leader, but in Norway/Sweden, they've had things like PayID (Vipps and Swish), MFA, etc. for a bit.
        mixmastamyk 9y ago
        Wikipedia mentions credit card linking and mobile apps, are those required? If so, would be negatives in my book.
      - noneeeed 9y ago
        When was that? I'm in the UK and I'm curious what I'm missing out on. I have mobile banking for everything, I can do almost instant (sub 30s) transfers between banks, we have contactless payment cards and Apple/Android pay support is ubiquitous, and we can do person to person transfers using a phone number (the horribly named "PayM"). What are we missing out on here that we should be pushing our banks for? I do see that there are a number of things that people just don't seem to use very much here, but that's less about the tech, and more that there just doesn't seem to be the demand, PayM being the big missed opportunity.
        mstibbard 9y ago
        This is not exhaustive but it is what comes to mind. * Paper still required for most proof of identity/address etc. Particularly annoying almost all providers are pushing customers to move to online statements but then opening any new accounts still require paper * Wet signatures still considered king/stronger than other forms of identification. This has caused me issues as I barely ever need to sign and hence my signature is never consistent! * Took 5 weeks to open an everyday account upon arrival. Seems pretty standard for all ex pats I've talked to. If you are a UK local maybe you've never experienced this? * Slow to list pending transactions although based on other posts here I may be an outlier in this experience. I assume the new digital banks (Monzo etc) have improved this significantly * Having to specify that you want a contactless debit/credit card - do people really not want contactless cards? You can always just not use that function... * All the banking apps I've seen over here are terrible, unfortunately didn't get to try out any of the new digital banks. I assume CBA is probably still the king for mobile banking capabilities * When I first arrived there was no Android Pay or Apple Pay, but thankfully that did come in around mid to late 2016 EDIT: I also signed up to use PayM but never came across a single person that I needed to transfer money to/receive from that actually had PayM
        fat-chunk 9y ago
        I've been with monzo for close to a year now, and have been with their current account for the last couple of months, and in my opinion it solves pretty much every issue you have listed above. I couldn't go back.
- MattPearce 9y ago
  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.
  - eggsome 9y ago
    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?
    - MattPearce 9y ago
      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
  - cm2187 9y ago
    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?
    - MattPearce 9y ago
      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.
      - chris_wot 9y ago
        I think I know one of the QA people who work in your company. You’ve done a pretty amazing job from the little snippets I’ve heard of this project!
- threeseed 9y ago
  No it's more like PayPal in that your PayID can be email/mobile. But that said I would rather trust my bank than PayPal and to be fair I run into people all the time without an account.
- thejosh 9y ago
  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.
  - adrian_mrd 9y ago
    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
avicoder 9y ago
How is it different from UPI?
- ydushyant 9y ago
  I was thinking the same and was wonder why nobody mentioned UPI
- incompatible 9y ago
  UPI is apparently something in India and this is something in Australia?
  - zaphirplane 9y ago
    How is Australia different from India - +3 funny - oh hang on this isn’t slashdot damn
jaequery 9y ago
Did I just read that they spent a billion dollars on it?
- sametmax 9y ago
  In the middle of the crypto currency bubble no less. The irony is string with this one.
- threeseed 9y ago
  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.
  - codebolt 9y ago
    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.
    - Intermernet 9y ago
      Apparently a lot of the cost and delay was making sure that the regulatory requirements for bank transfers were met. These are handled by APCA (Australian Payments Clearing Association), which is now Australian Payments Network Limited (AusPayNet)[0]. These transfers have traditionally been done over the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS). BECS is a dinosaur and I have a feeling that once you achieved agreement between the members of AusPayNet (about 120 members), met all regulations, tested the new system for reliability, performance and conformance, tested the new system for interoperability with BECS, made sure it didn't have any gaping holes that allowed fraud to take place and, finally, paid some serious money to all of the consultants and 3rd parties involved in the rollout, you'd easily approach the billion dollar mark. This project has been underway for about 6 years now. Think of it as ~$166MM per year for the rollout. I agree that it would be nice if the Australian financial sector were lean and optimized in the future, but I don't hold out that much hope to be honest, despite other countries managing to achieve this. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Payments_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Payments_Network
qzervaas 9y ago
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 phone number can only be assigned to a single bank.
- gonzo41 9y ago
  CBA handles 50% of Australian Banking each day. They already have the land!
- incompatible 9y ago
  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.
  - zaphirplane 9y ago
    With all the spam emails pretending to be Apple or PayPal I get, that pass the Hotmail / Gmail spam detector, you definitely want a special email address, with its own password and you’d forget name and password when you actually want to use it ;)
    - incompatible 9y ago
      Why, are you worried spammers will start sending you money?
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  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/ https://www.westpac.com.au/faq/payid-what-is-it/
sandos 9y ago
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.
- unixhero 9y ago
  Just like the Norwegian VIPPS. It literally means "in an instant", somewhat cheerfully.
- wowca 9y ago
  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.
  - axman6 9y ago
    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.
  - theBobBob 9y ago
    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.
    - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
      Too much of that and it becomes taxable "income" in less advanced Democracies.
baxtr 9y ago
Instant payments, aka “instant SEPA” will be available soon also in the EU https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...
- tethys 9y ago
  UniCredit introduced instant payments in Germany and Italy in November 2017, other large banks in Germany are due to follow this summer. https://www.unicreditgroup.eu/en/press-media/press-releases/2017/unicredit-rolls-out-its-cross-border-instant-payments-solution--.html https://www.unicreditgroup.eu/en/press-media/press-releases/...
  - antirez 9y ago
    Also Intesa have them in Italy.
  - a254613e 9y ago
    Too bad everything else is abysmal when it comes to technology and payments in Germany. Most places don't accept anything besides cash for payments. Opening a bank account still involves a ton of paperwork. Official mobile apps, if they even exist, are horrible. Waiting for 2 days for SEPA transfer, even though it's usually technically done within hours. No realtime transactions for card transactions (even though they have the data right away), etc. Unless the "SCT Inst" becomes a law that every bank must obey, I doubt majority of banks will have it implemented even within 5 years.
    - hocuspocus 9y ago
      Credit and debit card acceptance could definitely be better (even though I was doing all right in Berlin), but I don't agree about opening bank accounts: - N26: it took me literally 10 minutes. Identification via video chat. - comdirect: as far as I remember, I mailed them one 4-page form, dropped by the post office for the PostIdent and that was it. - Postbank (I needed an IBAN quickly while waiting for comdirect ;) : I walked in, everything was done in 15 minutes. Now try the same thing in France. Online banks typically ask an initial wire transfer from another French bank since they cannot check your identity directly. And then you need to provide proof of address and salary payslips (or tax receipts). And in the end it easily takes 3-4 weeks to receive all documents and your payment card.
gletard 9y ago
In India , similar system called IMPS is pretty popular for small to medium transactions. UPI is also getting popular and it’s based on IMPS
- MarkMc 9y ago
  How does it work? Can I use an Android app to send money? Do I just enter the recipient's mobile phone number or is there something else that identifies the recipient?
  - gobbledegook 9y ago
    Yep, the mobile phone number or something called as Virtual Payment Address that looks like an email address (name@bankname). It's actually quite useful and a lot of apps support it including WhatsApp and Google's Tez.
  - sseth 9y ago
    The use of mobile numbers to instantly transfer money is using UPI, a system built on top of IMPS. UPI is actually just an API. Third-party apps provide payment features on top of UPI.
  - gletard 9y ago
    For plain IMPS, you need to use your bank’s App. For UPI, you can use any app eg google tez, or WhatsApp. One requirement for both is you need to link mobile number with your bank account and for plain IMPS you need additional id called MMID for transfer. UPI does not need it. It also has cool feature of requesting money from other UPI addressses.
therealmarv 9y ago
Meanwhile in the EU: Wait more than 48 hours between countries and in the same country wait up to 24 hours. And let's not think about weekends in between ;)
- kuschku 9y ago
  There's so much wrong in this statement, it's a wonder how this was possible. Inter-country and intra-country transfers are all identical (all running via SEPA) and should make no difference. SEPA transfers are legally limited to 24 hours already. SEPA ICT is being rolled out right now, from summer on most banks should support it, which transfers up to €15'000 in 10 seconds.
  - therealmarv 9y ago
    you maybe never lived in other countries in the EU. It takes more than 24 hours. Client gives order to his bank in country A on Monday evening, bank will execute this order next morning because bank is closed. Money will be transferred from bank A to bank B within this 24 hours. Client b sees on mid day on day 3 or even 4, that's Wednesday (or Thursday) his money on his bank account. Don't tell me about the law... it does not work (and maybe only interbank it works) and I know from practicall experience this is not untypical.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      I live in Germany, and I'm using online banking with the Commerzbank (normal account), Postbank (savings) and N26 (CC). I've done hundreds of transfers, sent and received. In fact, frequently I transfer money to ny parents, or they to any of my accounts (they use commerzbank or postbank), and usually within of 10 minutes my phone gives me a push notification that the transaction has completed and the money is there.
      - therealmarv 9y ago
        What you are describing are transfers in the same bank. This are totally different than doing real cross border SEPA transfers. I'm only describing my experience with 4 countries (Lithuania, Cyprus, UK, Germany: all EU / EEA)
TekMol 9y ago
They spent one billion Australian Dollars to implement a national system for instant payments and have yet to convince banks to adopt it? And it forces users to hand out their phone number or email to strangers? Given that, Bitcoins $140B market cap does not seem too unreasonable. As it is international and gives users better privacy controls.
- nickonline 9y ago
  The banks spent $1B dollars, What are you saying they've not adopted.
- drodgers 9y ago
  Bitcoin: a bargain at $40 per transaction in fees! Edit: And several hours to clear
  - TekMol 9y ago
    It's true that Bitcoin's current setup is not suitable for a broader adoption. It's already at the limit with just 6 transactions per second. But the Lightning Network might be a solution to this. After reading quite a lot about it, I tend to think that it can work.
  - gruez 9y ago
    >$40 per transaction in fees! https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ what?
  - QML 9y ago
    Don't focus on Bitcoin; focus on the general idea of cryptocurrencies: international, fast, secure, decentralized. That idea is magnitudes of order way more difficult to implement than a banking platform built on top of preexisting infrastructure.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  This is the anti-privacy, anti-Bitcoin system. And HN people are loving it!
fiatjaf 9y ago
This seems like a way to incentivize people to replace use of cash with use of bank accounts, thus enabling the State and the IRS to better control people lives.
tmpmx132 9y ago
Mexico has had an instant payment system across all banks for quite q while now (spei)[1]. Does anyone knows how this compares to that? [1] http://www.banxico.org.mx/sistemas-de-pago/servicios/sistema-de-pagos-electronicos-interbancarios-spei/interbanking-electronic-payme.html http://www.banxico.org.mx/sistemas-de-pago/servicios/sistema...
jaimex2 9y ago
Not sure why it says Commonwealth Bank is the only one open at launch. I'm with ING and got an email about it being active this morning.
- dawogfather 9y ago
  Commonwealth own ing. They have for a faire while. That's why Commonwealth customers could use ing ATMs for free back when they still had fees
  - mstibbard 9y ago
    ING has ATMs? I don't think I've ever seen one, and thought it was partially why they offered to waive ATM fees for using our bank ATMs.
  - deecewan 9y ago
    None of this is true. ING Group owns ING. And, as far as I know, ING has never had ATMs in Australia. ING has a long history of fee-free ATM withdrawals. Nothing to do with CommBank.
  - ShinTakuya 9y ago
    You're thinking of Bankwest
- deecewan 9y ago
  Commonwealth is the only big bank, is what I got from the article. ING is definitely live. Although, I've still not actually figured out how to pay. It's telling me I can receive. I just can't pay (with CommBank). Friends on ING in the same boat.
jimmy1 9y ago
Reading about this and some of the comments here and the enthusiasm, it's a great development for sure. But I just hope that we don't leave out those who prefer to deal with physical currency in the name of "progress"
- raisspen 9y ago
  A lot of governments want to do away with physical currency as it is simply much more difficult to track than electronic transactions. I believe it is one of the reasons China put a lot of effort in developing their mobile payment systems.
EADGBE 9y ago
Is this similar to the Zelle push US banks are, well, pushing for?
- jslampe 9y ago
  No, the NPP is a backend settlement infrastructure used by the central bank. Zelle would be an example of an overlay service, utility or interface to engage with the settlement system. The Clearing House's RTP, UK's FPS, or Singapore's FAST would be more akin to the NPP. NOTE: Zelle is not currently using RTP, but will likely use it in the coming months or years.
djsumdog 9y ago
Even before this, Australia still had direct person-to-person transfers. They'd just take a day, and required an account number and name. I've written about this before, but American is terribly far behind on this: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is-still-in-the-1990s/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-i... The closest thing we have in the US is Zelle, which is not a government mandated standard (like ACH) but a private standard created by banks and which only a fraction of banks in the US currently support. And of course there are services like Venmo/Paypal, but these are private opt-in services, where as most other countries have this system mandated and fee-free between banks via their government reserve banks.
- contingencies 9y ago
  Nitpicky correction: before this, they only took a day if interbank. If intra-bank, they were immediate (at least on all the banks I've used).
- throw7 9y ago
  uggghhh. and these person-to-person services are terrible in the u.s. I was needed to help pay for a friend in the west coast for rent where the landlord took venmo. venmo denied me for who knows what reason. while this is going on, the landlord tried setting up google wallet (which I had already). I tried sending, but it never transferred (the bank said it was google's fault). I tried another one and it had to do that insert some money into account and read it to me dance which never showed up until later (which by then I gave up).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- eatonphil 9y ago
  From what I've heard, countries like Australia are often the trial place for systems like this. So it shouldn't exactly be a surprise or concern that the US doesn't also have these services (yet).
  - kentosi 9y ago
jslampe 9y ago
This article woefully undersells this development. As of today, Australia is the proud new owner of the world's most advanced payment system. This thing has it all, central directories, fraud sharing services, and an infrastructure BUILT for access by the private sector. There's some governance items and constraints here and there, but otherwise this is insanely advanced.
- DJN 9y ago
  Real-time payment platforms that interconnect all the banks in the country are not new. Heck, Nigeria rolled out a very advanced one about 7 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374597
xstartup 9y ago
Can anyone post a rough breakdown on how $1B can be spent to build such a system?
- coolspot 9y ago
  I imagine it could involve building two-tree tier 1 datacenters, writing couple independent software implementations cross-checking each other, integration with legacy systems, a lot of automated testing, documentation, training. Also big vendor prices are not exactly cheap or fair.
- idonotknowwhy 9y ago
  Look you "myki" on Wikipedia. This sort of thing is normal here in Australia. I assume it's corruption. So frustrating that I'm paying for all these this shit.
  - zuccs 9y ago
    You misspelled "NBN".
    - Whitestrake 9y ago
      I doubt he got them mixed up; myki is a pre-loaded NFC smart card payment system for public transport in Victoria, Australia. go cards are another similar system. NBN is a completely different beast, being an internet carrier and service wholesaler with ambitious and expensive last-mile infrastructure concerns, for one thing.
      - idonotknowwhy 9y ago
        Correct. I didn't get the mixed up, was just bringing up another example of stupid spending we do here.
jaaames 9y ago
Interesting bit is the 280 characters of test data you can include, enough for a small amount of JSON. I worked on a hackathon for NAB where we proposed banks could be an auth provider for payments that require ID, e.g. Buying a SIM card, signing a waiver etc at the point of sale
sengork 9y ago
Here's the press release from the Reserve Bank of Australia: https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2018/mr-18-02.html https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2018/mr-18-02.html
31b3r3t7 9y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/business/business-advanced-online-banking-born-of-necessity.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/business/business-advanced...
duncan_bayne 9y ago
Meanwhile, I still can't get access to a read only API for my own accounts (Commonwealth Bank).

183 points by adrian_mrd 9y ago

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.

mixmastamyk 9y ago
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 amount.
- dorian-graph 9y ago
  > Banking in ANZ is light years ahead of the US. And light years behind some other countries.
  - mstibbard 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, who is the world leader in banking? Going from Australia to the UK felt like going back in time 20 odd years.
    - dorian-graph 9y ago
      I'm not sure about world leader, but in Norway/Sweden, they've had things like PayID (Vipps and Swish), MFA, etc. for a bit.
      - mixmastamyk 9y ago
        Wikipedia mentions credit card linking and mobile apps, are those required? If so, would be negatives in my book.
    - noneeeed 9y ago
      When was that? I'm in the UK and I'm curious what I'm missing out on. I have mobile banking for everything, I can do almost instant (sub 30s) transfers between banks, we have contactless payment cards and Apple/Android pay support is ubiquitous, and we can do person to person transfers using a phone number (the horribly named "PayM"). What are we missing out on here that we should be pushing our banks for? I do see that there are a number of things that people just don't seem to use very much here, but that's less about the tech, and more that there just doesn't seem to be the demand, PayM being the big missed opportunity.
      - mstibbard 9y ago
        This is not exhaustive but it is what comes to mind. * Paper still required for most proof of identity/address etc. Particularly annoying almost all providers are pushing customers to move to online statements but then opening any new accounts still require paper * Wet signatures still considered king/stronger than other forms of identification. This has caused me issues as I barely ever need to sign and hence my signature is never consistent! * Took 5 weeks to open an everyday account upon arrival. Seems pretty standard for all ex pats I've talked to. If you are a UK local maybe you've never experienced this? * Slow to list pending transactions although based on other posts here I may be an outlier in this experience. I assume the new digital banks (Monzo etc) have improved this significantly * Having to specify that you want a contactless debit/credit card - do people really not want contactless cards? You can always just not use that function... * All the banking apps I've seen over here are terrible, unfortunately didn't get to try out any of the new digital banks. I assume CBA is probably still the king for mobile banking capabilities * When I first arrived there was no Android Pay or Apple Pay, but thankfully that did come in around mid to late 2016 EDIT: I also signed up to use PayM but never came across a single person that I needed to transfer money to/receive from that actually had PayM
        fat-chunk 9y ago
        I've been with monzo for close to a year now, and have been with their current account for the last couple of months, and in my opinion it solves pretty much every issue you have listed above. I couldn't go back.
MattPearce 9y ago
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.
- eggsome 9y ago
  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?
  - MattPearce 9y ago
    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
- cm2187 9y ago
  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?
  - MattPearce 9y ago
    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.
    - chris_wot 9y ago
      I think I know one of the QA people who work in your company. You’ve done a pretty amazing job from the little snippets I’ve heard of this project!
threeseed 9y ago
No it's more like PayPal in that your PayID can be email/mobile. But that said I would rather trust my bank than PayPal and to be fair I run into people all the time without an account.
thejosh 9y ago
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.
- adrian_mrd 9y ago
  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

avicoder 9y ago

How is it different from UPI?

ydushyant 9y ago
I was thinking the same and was wonder why nobody mentioned UPI
incompatible 9y ago
UPI is apparently something in India and this is something in Australia?
- zaphirplane 9y ago
  How is Australia different from India - +3 funny - oh hang on this isn’t slashdot damn

jaequery 9y ago

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

sametmax 9y ago
In the middle of the crypto currency bubble no less. The irony is string with this one.
threeseed 9y ago
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.
- codebolt 9y ago
  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.
  - Intermernet 9y ago
    Apparently a lot of the cost and delay was making sure that the regulatory requirements for bank transfers were met. These are handled by APCA (Australian Payments Clearing Association), which is now Australian Payments Network Limited (AusPayNet)[0]. These transfers have traditionally been done over the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS). BECS is a dinosaur and I have a feeling that once you achieved agreement between the members of AusPayNet (about 120 members), met all regulations, tested the new system for reliability, performance and conformance, tested the new system for interoperability with BECS, made sure it didn't have any gaping holes that allowed fraud to take place and, finally, paid some serious money to all of the consultants and 3rd parties involved in the rollout, you'd easily approach the billion dollar mark. This project has been underway for about 6 years now. Think of it as ~$166MM per year for the rollout. I agree that it would be nice if the Australian financial sector were lean and optimized in the future, but I don't hold out that much hope to be honest, despite other countries managing to achieve this. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Payments_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Payments_Network

qzervaas 9y ago

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 phone number can only be assigned to a single bank.

gonzo41 9y ago
CBA handles 50% of Australian Banking each day. They already have the land!
incompatible 9y ago
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.
- zaphirplane 9y ago
  With all the spam emails pretending to be Apple or PayPal I get, that pass the Hotmail / Gmail spam detector, you definitely want a special email address, with its own password and you’d forget name and password when you actually want to use it ;)
  - incompatible 9y ago
    Why, are you worried spammers will start sending you money?
SyneRyder 9y ago
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/ https://www.westpac.com.au/faq/payid-what-is-it/

sandos 9y ago

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.

unixhero 9y ago
Just like the Norwegian VIPPS. It literally means "in an instant", somewhat cheerfully.
wowca 9y ago
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.
- axman6 9y ago
  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.
- theBobBob 9y ago
  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.
  - kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
    Too much of that and it becomes taxable "income" in less advanced Democracies.

baxtr 9y ago

Instant payments, aka “instant SEPA” will be available soon also in the EU https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-instant-credit-transfer https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/sepa-insta...

tethys 9y ago
UniCredit introduced instant payments in Germany and Italy in November 2017, other large banks in Germany are due to follow this summer. https://www.unicreditgroup.eu/en/press-media/press-releases/2017/unicredit-rolls-out-its-cross-border-instant-payments-solution--.html https://www.unicreditgroup.eu/en/press-media/press-releases/...
- antirez 9y ago
  Also Intesa have them in Italy.
- a254613e 9y ago
  Too bad everything else is abysmal when it comes to technology and payments in Germany. Most places don't accept anything besides cash for payments. Opening a bank account still involves a ton of paperwork. Official mobile apps, if they even exist, are horrible. Waiting for 2 days for SEPA transfer, even though it's usually technically done within hours. No realtime transactions for card transactions (even though they have the data right away), etc. Unless the "SCT Inst" becomes a law that every bank must obey, I doubt majority of banks will have it implemented even within 5 years.
  - hocuspocus 9y ago
    Credit and debit card acceptance could definitely be better (even though I was doing all right in Berlin), but I don't agree about opening bank accounts: - N26: it took me literally 10 minutes. Identification via video chat. - comdirect: as far as I remember, I mailed them one 4-page form, dropped by the post office for the PostIdent and that was it. - Postbank (I needed an IBAN quickly while waiting for comdirect ;) : I walked in, everything was done in 15 minutes. Now try the same thing in France. Online banks typically ask an initial wire transfer from another French bank since they cannot check your identity directly. And then you need to provide proof of address and salary payslips (or tax receipts). And in the end it easily takes 3-4 weeks to receive all documents and your payment card.

gletard 9y ago

In India , similar system called IMPS is pretty popular for small to medium transactions. UPI is also getting popular and it’s based on IMPS

MarkMc 9y ago
How does it work? Can I use an Android app to send money? Do I just enter the recipient's mobile phone number or is there something else that identifies the recipient?
- gobbledegook 9y ago
  Yep, the mobile phone number or something called as Virtual Payment Address that looks like an email address (name@bankname). It's actually quite useful and a lot of apps support it including WhatsApp and Google's Tez.
- sseth 9y ago
  The use of mobile numbers to instantly transfer money is using UPI, a system built on top of IMPS. UPI is actually just an API. Third-party apps provide payment features on top of UPI.
- gletard 9y ago
  For plain IMPS, you need to use your bank’s App. For UPI, you can use any app eg google tez, or WhatsApp. One requirement for both is you need to link mobile number with your bank account and for plain IMPS you need additional id called MMID for transfer. UPI does not need it. It also has cool feature of requesting money from other UPI addressses.

therealmarv 9y ago

Meanwhile in the EU: Wait more than 48 hours between countries and in the same country wait up to 24 hours. And let's not think about weekends in between ;)

kuschku 9y ago
There's so much wrong in this statement, it's a wonder how this was possible. Inter-country and intra-country transfers are all identical (all running via SEPA) and should make no difference. SEPA transfers are legally limited to 24 hours already. SEPA ICT is being rolled out right now, from summer on most banks should support it, which transfers up to €15'000 in 10 seconds.
- therealmarv 9y ago
  you maybe never lived in other countries in the EU. It takes more than 24 hours. Client gives order to his bank in country A on Monday evening, bank will execute this order next morning because bank is closed. Money will be transferred from bank A to bank B within this 24 hours. Client b sees on mid day on day 3 or even 4, that's Wednesday (or Thursday) his money on his bank account. Don't tell me about the law... it does not work (and maybe only interbank it works) and I know from practicall experience this is not untypical.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    I live in Germany, and I'm using online banking with the Commerzbank (normal account), Postbank (savings) and N26 (CC). I've done hundreds of transfers, sent and received. In fact, frequently I transfer money to ny parents, or they to any of my accounts (they use commerzbank or postbank), and usually within of 10 minutes my phone gives me a push notification that the transaction has completed and the money is there.
    - therealmarv 9y ago
      What you are describing are transfers in the same bank. This are totally different than doing real cross border SEPA transfers. I'm only describing my experience with 4 countries (Lithuania, Cyprus, UK, Germany: all EU / EEA)

TekMol 9y ago

They spent one billion Australian Dollars to implement a national system for instant payments and have yet to convince banks to adopt it? And it forces users to hand out their phone number or email to strangers? Given that, Bitcoins $140B market cap does not seem too unreasonable. As it is international and gives users better privacy controls.

nickonline 9y ago
The banks spent $1B dollars, What are you saying they've not adopted.
drodgers 9y ago
Bitcoin: a bargain at $40 per transaction in fees! Edit: And several hours to clear
- TekMol 9y ago
  It's true that Bitcoin's current setup is not suitable for a broader adoption. It's already at the limit with just 6 transactions per second. But the Lightning Network might be a solution to this. After reading quite a lot about it, I tend to think that it can work.
- gruez 9y ago
  >$40 per transaction in fees! https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ what?
- QML 9y ago
  Don't focus on Bitcoin; focus on the general idea of cryptocurrencies: international, fast, secure, decentralized. That idea is magnitudes of order way more difficult to implement than a banking platform built on top of preexisting infrastructure.
fiatjaf 9y ago
This is the anti-privacy, anti-Bitcoin system. And HN people are loving it!

fiatjaf 9y ago

This seems like a way to incentivize people to replace use of cash with use of bank accounts, thus enabling the State and the IRS to better control people lives.

tmpmx132 9y ago

Mexico has had an instant payment system across all banks for quite q while now (spei)[1]. Does anyone knows how this compares to that? [1] http://www.banxico.org.mx/sistemas-de-pago/servicios/sistema-de-pagos-electronicos-interbancarios-spei/interbanking-electronic-payme.html http://www.banxico.org.mx/sistemas-de-pago/servicios/sistema...

jaimex2 9y ago

Not sure why it says Commonwealth Bank is the only one open at launch. I'm with ING and got an email about it being active this morning.

dawogfather 9y ago
Commonwealth own ing. They have for a faire while. That's why Commonwealth customers could use ing ATMs for free back when they still had fees
- mstibbard 9y ago
  ING has ATMs? I don't think I've ever seen one, and thought it was partially why they offered to waive ATM fees for using our bank ATMs.
- deecewan 9y ago
  None of this is true. ING Group owns ING. And, as far as I know, ING has never had ATMs in Australia. ING has a long history of fee-free ATM withdrawals. Nothing to do with CommBank.
- ShinTakuya 9y ago
  You're thinking of Bankwest
deecewan 9y ago
Commonwealth is the only big bank, is what I got from the article. ING is definitely live. Although, I've still not actually figured out how to pay. It's telling me I can receive. I just can't pay (with CommBank). Friends on ING in the same boat.

jimmy1 9y ago

Reading about this and some of the comments here and the enthusiasm, it's a great development for sure. But I just hope that we don't leave out those who prefer to deal with physical currency in the name of "progress"

raisspen 9y ago
A lot of governments want to do away with physical currency as it is simply much more difficult to track than electronic transactions. I believe it is one of the reasons China put a lot of effort in developing their mobile payment systems.

EADGBE 9y ago

Is this similar to the Zelle push US banks are, well, pushing for?

jslampe 9y ago
No, the NPP is a backend settlement infrastructure used by the central bank. Zelle would be an example of an overlay service, utility or interface to engage with the settlement system. The Clearing House's RTP, UK's FPS, or Singapore's FAST would be more akin to the NPP. NOTE: Zelle is not currently using RTP, but will likely use it in the coming months or years.

djsumdog 9y ago

Even before this, Australia still had direct person-to-person transfers. They'd just take a day, and required an account number and name. I've written about this before, but American is terribly far behind on this: https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is-still-in-the-1990s/ https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-i... The closest thing we have in the US is Zelle, which is not a government mandated standard (like ACH) but a private standard created by banks and which only a fraction of banks in the US currently support. And of course there are services like Venmo/Paypal, but these are private opt-in services, where as most other countries have this system mandated and fee-free between banks via their government reserve banks.

contingencies 9y ago
Nitpicky correction: before this, they only took a day if interbank. If intra-bank, they were immediate (at least on all the banks I've used).
throw7 9y ago
uggghhh. and these person-to-person services are terrible in the u.s. I was needed to help pay for a friend in the west coast for rent where the landlord took venmo. venmo denied me for who knows what reason. while this is going on, the landlord tried setting up google wallet (which I had already). I tried sending, but it never transferred (the bank said it was google's fault). I tried another one and it had to do that insert some money into account and read it to me dance which never showed up until later (which by then I gave up).
deleted 9y ago
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eatonphil 9y ago
From what I've heard, countries like Australia are often the trial place for systems like this. So it shouldn't exactly be a surprise or concern that the US doesn't also have these services (yet).
- kentosi 9y ago

jslampe 9y ago

This article woefully undersells this development. As of today, Australia is the proud new owner of the world's most advanced payment system. This thing has it all, central directories, fraud sharing services, and an infrastructure BUILT for access by the private sector. There's some governance items and constraints here and there, but otherwise this is insanely advanced.

DJN 9y ago
Real-time payment platforms that interconnect all the banks in the country are not new. Heck, Nigeria rolled out a very advanced one about 7 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16374597

xstartup 9y ago

Can anyone post a rough breakdown on how $1B can be spent to build such a system?

coolspot 9y ago
I imagine it could involve building two-tree tier 1 datacenters, writing couple independent software implementations cross-checking each other, integration with legacy systems, a lot of automated testing, documentation, training. Also big vendor prices are not exactly cheap or fair.
idonotknowwhy 9y ago
Look you "myki" on Wikipedia. This sort of thing is normal here in Australia. I assume it's corruption. So frustrating that I'm paying for all these this shit.
- zuccs 9y ago
  You misspelled "NBN".
  - Whitestrake 9y ago
    I doubt he got them mixed up; myki is a pre-loaded NFC smart card payment system for public transport in Victoria, Australia. go cards are another similar system. NBN is a completely different beast, being an internet carrier and service wholesaler with ambitious and expensive last-mile infrastructure concerns, for one thing.
    - idonotknowwhy 9y ago
      Correct. I didn't get the mixed up, was just bringing up another example of stupid spending we do here.

jaaames 9y ago

Interesting bit is the 280 characters of test data you can include, enough for a small amount of JSON. I worked on a hackathon for NAB where we proposed banks could be an auth provider for payments that require ID, e.g. Buying a SIM card, signing a waiver etc at the point of sale

sengork 9y ago

Here's the press release from the Reserve Bank of Australia: https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2018/mr-18-02.html https://www.rba.gov.au/media-releases/2018/mr-18-02.html

31b3r3t7 9y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/business/business-advanced-online-banking-born-of-necessity.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/business/business-advanced...

duncan_bayne 9y ago

Meanwhile, I still can't get access to a read only API for my own accounts (Commonwealth Bank).