Farm Tender

Video - P2P and B2B Payments - This is exciting for Agriculture

That annoying wait for a payment to transfer to or from your account will soon be a thing of the past, thanks to most banks moving to real-time payments from 26 January.

Watch the video here https://youtu.be/-0xJmze8xbs

A group of 13 banks and financial institutions are collaborating on a new $1bn platform, run by a company called the New Payments Platform Australia (NPP Australia), which will enable much simpler, real-time transfers between accounts.

The full introduction of the new system is scheduled to start when people return from their summer holidays but in the meantime it will be road-tested by bank staff, who will be able to make real-time payments between each other and their bank.

The main advantage for consumers will be that they will not need to wait for their money as they do now – sometimes for 24 hours. But it will also allow transfers using much simpler identifiers than a BSB and account number, such as a mobile phone number or email address.

Customers will be able to set their own more memorable identifier that is attached to their bank account, thus avoiding the problem of payments going astray due to a mistyped account number. There will also be more scope to include longer messages with transfers, which are currently limited to 18 characters.