New Payments Platform of Australia

New Payments Platform (NPP) is a national payments infrastructure for Australia aiming at providing real-time, fast, flexible, data rich payments among participants. It is centrally managed by Reserve Bank of Australia. It was first made accessible to the general public on February 13, 2018 with the launch of PayID, a simple addressing capability, and Osko[1], the first NPP Overlay Service, operated by BPAY. As of 2020, more than 60 of Australian banks have adopted the system.

Under the NPP, households, businesses and government agencies can send and receive faster, data-rich payments.

• Faster payments. You can send near-instant money transfers from one bank account to another, with real-time clearing and settlement available 24/7. This means that you will be able to send and receive payment to banks other than your own outside of banking hours without any delay.
• Data-rich payments. This means you can attach longer descriptions to your payments. Instead of using all sorts of acronyms and abbreviations to squeeze a long description into the available character limit, you can clearly detail what a payment is for.
• PayID. You also have the option to register for a PayID, which can be your phone number, email address or ABN, that you can use instead of your BSB and account number. This service is offered by Osko and is an overlay service on the New Payments Platform. You can read this guide to find out more information on PayIDs or contact your institution to find out if PayID is available.

NPP highlevel architecture is composed of following architectural elements.

• Distributed switch of individual ‘Payment Access Gateways’ hosted by financial institutions who have chosen to connect directly.
• hese gateways route and exchange financial messages between each other using NPP ISO 20022 messages.
• Payment messages are cleared between participating financial institutions and then settled by the RBA’s Fast Settlement Service.

High-level architecture is shown below.