Aussies to get instant bank payments to mobiles, email

Payments provider BPay will provide the first service on top of Australia's new national payments platform, and allow individuals to transfer funds to others using just their mobile phone number and email address.

Australia's new payments platform (NPP) - which is set to launch in 2017 - will include an 'initial convenience service' (ICS) that will let consumers immediately make or receive electronic payments.

BPay has been contracted to build the service. From 2017, all customers of the 12 financial institutions signed up to the NPP will be able to send payments in real-time to someone's mobile number, email address or ABN.

It will be the first service to run on Australia's new national payments platform, which is being built by Fiserv and Swift.

The NPP is made up of a base infrastructure that all Australian financial institutions connect to, allowing payments to be made in real-time between banks and their customers.

It will support overlay services - such as the ICS - which will allow banks and financial institutions to offer tailored services.

The ICS will mean that all customers of CBA, NAB, ANZ, Westpac and others will be able to enter a person's email or mobile phone number into their mobile banking application to transfer them funds.

 "A good example would be to say you've got friends buying concert tickets. You type in their mobile phone number into your banking front end and the NPP resolves that phone number into bank account details it has stored," Bpay CEO John Banfield said.

"Then the payment goes through to that person's account in real-time ... and you can have confidence it's gone through to the right person."

Banfield said all participating banks had committed to have their mobile banking front-ends equipped for the service by the 2017 go-live.

The NPP was borne out of a the Reserve Bank of Australia's ambition to have all the nation’s financial institutions facilitating real-time payments by 2016.

Once it goes live, the NPP will enable same-day settlement of bulk and direct payments, real-time retail payments, and the ability to finalise low-value payments outside banking hours.

The RBA has also proposed that by 2017, the system will enable banks to ditch BSBs and account numbers in favour of a single identifying number for receivers of payments.

BPay - which is owned by Australia's big four banks - processed more than 368 million payments worth around $325 billion in the last financial year.