CommBank launches platform for easy payments

The NPP infrastructure has been designed and built by the Australian financial services industry and allows the transfer of money between accounts across 60 different financial institutions.

A CBA spokesman told iTWire that more than 130,000 people had already registered to obtain a PayID.

Other participating financial institutions are listed on the NPP website. The NPP went live today but no other banks appear to have decided to start offering it immediately.

{loadposition sam08}Commonwealth Bank executive general manager, Digital, Pete Steel, said the bank was proud to be among the first to offer the NPP to customers.

The NPP will initially be made available via the CommBank app. To receive near real-time payments customers can register their mobile number as their PayID.

“As the first major bank to offer real-time banking to customers in 2010, we welcome payment solutions that make it faster and easier to send and receive money between Australians," he said.

"With more than $6 billion of transactions across the CommBank app each week, we are pleased to be one of the first Australian banks to offer our customers a way to receive and make payments instantly from other financial institutions.

“We are committed to delivering a safe, high-quality option to our customers. We have offered instant payments between our customers for some years now and we look forward to seeing the take up across the industry now that the Platform has launched.”

Steel noted that the platform integrated into CBA’s current real-time banking offering which extends across the bank’s products and has been designed to operate 24/7, with zero downtime.

“We have used our previous experience deploying and running real-time systems to design and integrate this new way to pay. Our new, simplified modular architecture enables our payment services to be easily extended and we have plans in place to evolve and grow our offering as the Platform matures.”