FIS - Real-Time Payments in Australia
Company: FIS Payments, Jacksonville, FL USA
Company Description: FIS™ is a global leader in financial services technology, with a focus on retail and institutional banking, payments, asset and wealth management, risk & compliance, consulting and outsourcing solutions. Through the depth and breadth of our solutions portfolio, global capabilities and domain expertise, FIS serves more than 20,000 clients in over 130 countries.
Nomination Category: Awards for the Innovation in Technology
Nomination Sub Category: Award for the Innovation in Technology Development > Financial Services Industries
Nomination Title: Real-Time Payments in Australia
ENTRY:
In 2013, the Australian banking community responded to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Strategic Review of Innovation in the Payments System with a proposal for real-time payments, employing ISO 20022 standard electronic data interchange between financial institutions, to go into effect in 2018.
Since then, FIS has developed an innovative platform to allow banks and financial institutions to integrate their customer channels and back-end systems into the infrastructure of the New Payments Platform (NPP), which is the central enabler of real-time payments in Australia.
FIS saw an opportunity to assist individual banks and banking aggregators by establishing and simplifying the standard interface of NPP. By creating a flexible integration with bank systems, the standard interface allows banks to send and receive real-time payments. Our innovation is now accepted as the most widely implemented solution for NPP integration.
Challenge
NPP messaging is fundamentally different from payment types such as ATM messaging and card-based transactions. Rather than authorizing the withdrawal of funds, the first step of an NPP payment message is to send a request to the receiving bank to accept credit payments in real-time. Next is to make those funds available for withdrawal within seconds. This establishes an expectation where both payers and payees can anticipate flawless execution and dependable service. Over time, these services will be expanded to embed payments within the value chain of goods and services. The expansion will include linking merchants and their customers in a series of real-time interactions outside of traditional pathways, which are costly and largely dependent on multi-national networks.
Solution Features
- Our solution sets the foundation for managing real-time payments by enabling application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow our clients to innovate not just within the FIS application, but with their current and future product offerings
- Many core banking systems are currently unable to offer real-time payments with 24/7 availability. Rather than impose the cost on banks to make their core systems ready for the real-time payments world, FIS has simplified the implementation by including an innovative core banking integration component. This component “stands in” when core systems are unable to accept real-time payments. This brings banks into the 24/7 world without increasing their costs and implementing a great deal of change on their end.
- Our NPP compliant interface supports banks to ensure they are up-to-date with the NPP infrastructure.
Outcome:
NPP payments went public in February 2018 and FIS’ solution has been a significant contributor to its success. Each of our implementations thus far has met the demanding requirement of NPP by 99.999% uptimes.
Three banks have already participated in industry trials and have gone live with FIS’ solution. One of these banks is a tier one bank in Australia; the other three tier one banks that did not use our solution haven’t provided a date for when they will launch real-time payments in Australia.
Additionally, we’re working with three other participants, who will be among the second wave of NPP participants to launch in late 2018. FIS is the only real-time payments solution vendor to have secured more than one customer from the first wave of 10 banks participating in this scheme. As the global leader in payment hub implementations, FIS has helped more than 40 banks and related financial institutions integrate their back-end services with national clearing systems around the world. Our Open Payment Framework (OPF) was modelled on ISO 2002 data and has enabled us to use the same underlying services for both real-time and batch payments, fulfilling our philosophy that “a payment is a payment is a payment” regardless of how it is initiated or executed.
Attachments & Links:
FIS Flavors of Fast: A Trip Around The World Of Immediate Payments
https://vo-general.s3.amazonaws.com/d41a0740-7bab-4985-83c6-71c47cf0bc3c/68f3f054-de03-444d-b1b1-bf4f4236b0b6?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ3YBR5GY2XF7YLGQ&Expires=1615836652&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22FIS_Flavors%20of%20Fast_2017.pdf%22&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&Signature=LAirqPxWAVN3xT2t5GnElGhxMzs%3D
http://www.apca.com.au/about-payments/future-of-payments/real-time-payments