Reliability of Payment Networks Under the Spotlight

We report all too frequently on payments system failures – see the end of this article for a recent example. But it is interesting that the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has recently chosen to draw attention to the performance and reliability of Australia’s new payments platform (NPP), particularly noting the need and priority of improving the ‘resilience of Australia’s payments and market infrastructure’.

NPP is run by Australia’s commercial banks, and they had been hoping to shut down the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) to drive traffic to the NPP. With the Governor highlighting NPP services as unreliable, experiencing frequent outages in terms of downtime, there is doubt that this will be possible, even by the planned shut down date of 2030.