Only government has the scale to bend the adoption curve to Australia’s real-time payment infrastructure, writes Chris Jewell.
Australia built world‑class digital rails in the New Payments Platform. Yet across government – the nation’s single largest processor of payments – the dominant rail for moving money is still the old direct‑entry system behind BECS.
The gap between what we’ve built and what we use is now the core risk to meeting industry’s conditional 2030 retirement date for BECS. This deadline was meant to be an enabler for the transition to the NPP but has become the focus point for all the reasons we can’t achieve this date. Regardless, deadlines don’t deliver transitions, adoption does. If we agree the end-state is NPP-led, the Commonwealth’s own adoption is the signal that will move the market.
The Commonwealth sits in a unique position: it is both policymaker and the country’s most influential payments user. Services Australia alone oversaw $239.1 billion in social and health payments in 2023–24. The Reserve Bank, as banker to government, still processes the bulk of those payments via direct entry (BECS) because that’s just how the machinery has run for decades. Moving that mass of activity onto PayTo and the NPP would do more to normalise real‑time payments across the economy than any marketing campaign or mandate ever could.
Real-time payments are built for the work government does every day.
The timing is right. Australian Payments Plus reports that NPP usage is already surging, with over 1.6 billion transactions worth $1.99 trillion in 2024 and more than 30 per cent Australia’s account‑to‑account volumes now flowing over real‑time rails.
The private sector is experiencing strong momentum, with large enterprises already embracing real-time payments for operational, economic, and consumer benefit. What’s still missing is a public signal that the Commonwealth genuinely backs the infrastructure that will replace the soon-to-be-retired BECS system.
The benefits of real-time payments go beyond simply near-instant processing times. Payment methods like PayTo are built for the work government does every day: collecting, disbursing, and reconciling at a national scale. It provides upfront, citizen‑controlled consent, instant settlement, and data‑rich messages that reduce manual handling and exceptions. That means fewer delayed refunds, fewer aged‑debt follow ups, faster disaster relief and hardship support, and streamlined reconciliation across agencies.
Security improves, too. The industry’s Confirmation of Payee program adds a name‑matching check before funds move, reducing misdirection, error and certain scams. Pair that with PayTo’s consent model and you have a far more defensible posture than legacy debits that surface problems days after an incident occurs.
There’s also a clean intersection with policy. Payday superannuation – scheduled to commence from 1 July 2026 – requires super to be paid with wages, not weeks later. While legislation is still being finalised, the direction is unambiguous. Routing those contributions over real‑time rails helps employers comply and employees see their savings land when expected.
The Commonwealth needs to lead by example.
Operationally, the gains are immediate: lower cost‑to‑serve by stripping out batch files and exception queues, better cash visibility, fewer chargebacks and card scheme fees on government receipts, and the ability to design citizen experiences that feel modern because they are modern.
Industry has set a conditional 2030 target to retire BECS, but the RBA’s risk assessment is blunt: we don’t yet have a shared end‑state and coordination has been insufficient.
The ACCC’s authorisation to allow AP+ and AusPayNet to plan together is a vital and critical step, but it is not a finish line. The only actor with the scale to bend the adoption curve quickly is government itself. This is not about ripping out BECS tomorrow. It’s about a managed dual‑rail transition that delivers benefits now while reducing risk later. But the signal must be unmistakable: the Commonwealth needs to lead by example.
Australia has already done the hard, nation‑building work of laying the rails. The returns on that investment won’t arrive by committee, they’ll arrive the moment government runs its own payments over them. If we want a faster, safer, more affordable payments system by 2030, Canberra needs to show, not tell, what leadership looks like.
Chris Jewell, President and Co-Founder at Zepto
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