*Pay attention to their review date after the birth of Bitcoin along with the construction date and the lay time to implementation! A very delayed defensive fight back or a half calculated panic re-action to hold of the onslaught and spread of the new world of digital currencies!!!!! SB Instant funds transfers between banks to be possible from January next year A “fantastic” new payments system is coming to Australia that will revolutionise how we make digital payments, according to the Reserve Bank. RBA governor Philip Lowe reminded the nation of its impending arrival last week when, during a parliamentary hearing, he boasted that “people are going to find this new payment system fantastic – that is my hope”. Its creation dates back to a review of the system in 2010, and has been under construction since 2014, but we are only starting to learn more details of how exactly it will work. Newly-appointed RBA governor Philip Lowe is excited about the new system. Photo: AAP It is slated to be rolled out in the second half of 2017, with BPAY the first company signed up to use it. What is it? As explained recently by The New Daily, one of the important functions of the Reserve Bank is administering the payments system. This is the computer system that enables non-cash payments to be transferred between the banks. Approximately $180 billion goes through this system every day, the RBA estimated in 2014. What does the RBA actually do? We explain Bank mega-profits under scrutiny When you send money to a friend from your CBA account to their Westpac account, it is processed by the system. When you buy something on eBay using Paypal, the money is sent to the seller using the system. And when you buy a coffee with your credit card, the cafe and your bank communicate through the system. The new system is a joint project of 12 institutions, including the Reserve Bank and the big four banks, and was built by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). Faster Digital payments should be processed faster. Photo: Getty A common complaint with digital payments is that they often take hours or even days to be finalised. The new system should fix this. Currently, high value payments, such as those between the banks themselves, are processed in real time. (As are transfers between accounts at the same bank, which do not use the Reserve Bank’s payment system). But direct debits and credits by businesses (such as when Netflix automatically deducts your monthly subscription) are not processed until the end of the same business day. The new system will allow real-time processing for all ‘push’ payments (where you send money; the opposite of ‘pull’ payments like credit cards) within seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. More information You’ll have plenty of space to type a long description of what exactly your bank transfer is for. Photo: Getty Have you ever tried to send a digital transfer to a friend, only to run out of room to describe what it’s for? You type “Repayment for …”, and that’s all it allows. It’s because of an antiquated 14-character limit left over from a time when the payment system relied on punch cards. Governor Lowe has promised the new system will fix this. “You will be able to send whatever information you like with your payment,” he told Parliament last week. So, no more character limits. It may also fix another frustrating problem. Have you ever tried to reconcile your credit card statement, only to be left confused by all the names? Nobody is who they seem. Your local butcher is ‘XYZ Pty Ltd’, your dentist is ‘Prime Solutions’ and the humble corner shop is something lofty like ‘Global Merchant Enterprises’. There is no guarantee the problem will be fixed by the new system, as it would require merchants to provide more information, and the banks to print this information on our bank statements. But if they want to, the new system will allow it. Easier addressing The new system should also allow Australians to send digital payments without the need to remember lengthy account numbers and BSBs. Instead, we may be able to simply type in a person’s email address or mobile phone number, according to Governor Lowe. Again, how this works in practice will depend on how the banks and other institutions make use of the system. For example, what if your friend has two accounts at the Commonwealth Bank? We should learn these details next year. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-03/instant-bank-transfers-will-soon-be-a-reality/9012270
Correct link for article http://thenewdaily.com.au/money/finance-news/2016/09/26/new-payments-platform/ Other links below by ABC http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-03/instant-bank-transfers-will-soon-be-a-reality/9012270 http://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/pm/almost-instant-bank-transfers-here-by-australia-day/9012288
I've got payments industry circulars/newsletters from 2007/2008 somewhere trying to drum up support for the RBA review (that eventually happened in 2010). Everyone has known for a long time that the inter-bank transfer system was getting old and clunky, but the RBA was given a kick in the butt by the Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) being rolled out in 2008/2009 and catching up to Europe was the ultimate catalyst for the 2010 review. I seriously doubt the RBA was even aware of Bitcoin in 2010. The Silk Road marketplace wasn't even launched until, what, 2011 where you could actually spend your bitcoins on something interesting. Crazy internet currencies have been around for decades and it's not like the RBA has teams of people scouring the internet for existential threats to it's existence. Anyone remember e-gold? beenz.com? The NPP has been a long time in development because it basically involves re-engineering the entire banking system, and some banks are still using systems and code from the 70s. They work (or have worked) and you only have to look at what happens when a bank goes offline for a day to see the massive clusterf**k it causes, which is why they generally don't mess with things unless it's absolutely necessary. It's critical infrastructure. They can't just behave like Google (or Bitcoin developers for that matter) and say "yeah, it's in Beta, just submit a bug report if your account and money vanishes and we'll fix it in the next update".
