The New Payments Platform enables fast, versatile and data-rich payments between Australian financial institutions, consumers and businesses.

To take advantage of real-time payments you don’t have to directly connect to the platform as an NPP Participant. Flexible access models, such as Cuscal’s agency arrangement, enables PSPs to build innovative payment experiences leveraging platform capabilities without having to meet the stringent requirements of an NPP Participant.

At Cuscal we can help you take advantage of real-time payments by partnering with you to provide wholesale access to NPP capabilities, freeing your business to focus on building innovative real-time payment solutions for the end customer.

Benefits of connecting to the New Payments Platform include:

• The efficient allocation of capital through the availability of cleared funds in real-time.
• Ability to make low-value payments outside of banking hours.
• More complete remittance information included with payments.
• Simplifying payment reconciliation with unique account identifiers and PayIDs.
• Removing the uncertainty of making and receiving payments from bank accounts, with real-time account validation, fund verification and notifications for pre-authorised PayTo agreements.

Why Cuscal?
Payments technology and solutions are our specialty. With over 50 years working to help our clients adapt to a changing banking and payments industry, and around 120 clients from a range of different industries, we have the industry partnerships, scale and expertise to help you take advantage of every benefit the NPP has to offer.

As a payments solutions expert, we have all the processes you’ve come to expect – while being agile enough to provide you with the personalised solutions, attentive service and easy integration that your business needs.

To find out how we can connect you to the New Payments Platform, contact us.

Cuscal is working with NPP Australia, industry participants and clients to develop PayTo – an innovative new way for payments to be pre-authorised from bank accounts, providing better visibility and control of payments arrangements.

Available mid-2022, PayTo will provide the Australian market with a broad, scalable approach to third party payment initiation for real-time account-to-account payments, supporting new payment experiences and providing consumers with greater visibility and control over payments made from their account.

Cuscal’s PayTo service

Cuscal’s PayTo service is an independent service layer, decoupled from Cuscal’s core NPP Solution, meaning financial institutions don’t have to be connected to the NPP through Cuscal to leverage our PayTo service. While flexible RESTful APIs enable the easy integration of required PayTo service capabilities into existing NPP systems without complex system development.

Our solutions supports all NPPA mandatory compliance requirements, including:

• PayTo agreement creation and amendments, including status changes and notifications.
• Orchestration and validation of PayTo notifications and payment initiation requests.
• Processing of all PayTo-related messages via the NPP Basic Infrastructure.

If you’d like to learn more about Cuscal’s PayTo service for financial institutions, contact us.

Cuscal is working with NPP Australia, industry participants and clients to develop PayTo – an innovative new way for payments to be pre-authorised from bank accounts, providing better visibility and control of payments arrangements.

Available mid-2022, PayTo will support the development of innovative new ‘on behalf of’ payment services, allowing consumers to authorise third parties to initiate payments from their account via the NPP in real-time. PayTo will support a range of use cases, including as an alternative to direct debit by addressing some of the pain points typically experienced by businesses with the current direct debit system:

• Account validation in real-time when an agreement is created, resulting in fewer dishonours.
• Centralised record-keeping for audit and dispute resolution.
• Faster payment processing and confirmation of outcomes.
• Notifications when PayTo arrangements are paused, cancelled or amended.
• PayTo agreement portability reduces the risk of dishonours when a customer switches accounts.

If you’d like to learn more about Cuscal’s PayTo service for third-party payment initiators, contact us.

In an economy where customers expect payments to be sent in real-time, traditional approaches to fraud prevention are less effective. And although the NPP isn’t riskier than any other payment platform, fraudsters are always looking for new opportunities to make money.

The velocity and irrevocable nature of real-time payments mean that organisations no longer have the luxury of time to detect and prevent fraudulent activity before a payment is processed. A state of the art fraud management platform is therefore essential to managing and reducing the risks of fraud for your customers and business.

We have created Vigil for NPP, an advanced, data-driven fraud engine, which leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and reduce fraud, while still allowing payments to be authorised in real-time.

Learn more about our fraud solution for the New Payments Platform.

We’re proud of our role in the design and delivery of the NPP, alongside the 12 other shareholders of NPP Australia Ltd.

Historically, money moved slowly between different financial institutions in Australia. This is because payments were collected up throughout the business day into batches and then sent on at certain times. This meant that money moved slowly during business hours and often didn’t move at all after hours and on the weekend. The NPP changes all this, allowing money to move between different financial institutions in ‘real-time’. Money moves between NPP-connected accounts in seconds, any time of the day or night.

When the Platform went live Cuscal was there on ‘day 1’ connecting more financial institutions to the New Payments Platform than anyone else. Over half of the financial institutions (40 retail banking brands) live on ‘day 1’ were connected via Cuscal. Since launch we’ve continued to connect more banks to the Platform.

All of the current payment service providers live on the Platform have been connected via Cuscal. Examples of clients that have built upon Cuscal’s NPP service to launch innovative real-time payment solutions for their customers include Assembly Payments, Azupay, Monoova and Split Payments.