We Built World-Class Payment Rails. Now Let's Open Them Up.
Australia already has real-time payments, simple addressing and digital consent. The next chapter is bringing them to everyday checkout.
Australia has quietly built some of the best payment infrastructure in the world.
Money moves between bank accounts in seconds, at any hour, on any day. People can be paid using a phone number or email address instead of a BSB and account number. And since 2022, there has been a way for customers to give, see, pause and cancel permission for a business to take payments from their account, all from their banking app.
That is a remarkable set of capabilities. It took years of work and serious investment from banks, the payments industry and regulators to get here, and it works.
The way I see it, we have built the rails. The next chapter is using them for more of the payments Australians make every day.
What we already have
It helps to see the three pieces side by side, because together they are more than the sum of their parts.
Real-time money movement. The New Payments Platform, live since 2018, moves money between accounts in near real time, around the clock. Funds arrive, and both sides know it straight away.
Simple addressing. PayID lets someone pay you using an identifier they already know, like a phone number or ABN. It removes the friction and the errors of typing account numbers, and it shows the payer the name of who they’re paying before they send.
Digital consent. PayTo lets a customer authorise a business to take payments from their account, with clear limits, and manage that permission themselves. It is consent that is visible, controllable and readable by every party involved.1
Real-time payouts on PayID are already a success story. Refunds, insurance claims, wages and payments between friends are faster and simpler than they were a few years ago. The question I keep coming back to is how we bring that same experience to the other side: the moment a customer pays a business.
Where everyday payments are today
Cards are deeply woven into how Australians pay. In 2025, cards made up around 73 per cent of all consumer payments by number, with debit cards alone at almost half.2 Cards are convenient, familiar and trusted, and they will remain an important part of the mix.
How Australians paid, 2025 (share of consumer payments by number)
But every card payment carries a cost. There are interchange and scheme fees, the cost of terminals and gateways, fraud and chargeback handling, and the ongoing effort of keeping card data secure and compliant. Each layer exists for a good reason. Together, they add up.
Until recently, many businesses passed some of that cost on as a surcharge. Australians were paying an estimated $1.6 billion a year in card surcharges.3 With surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa cards now banned from 1 October 2026, that cost hasn’t disappeared. Businesses either absorb it, or it is built quietly into the price of what we buy.
The surcharge reforms are a sensible step for consumers. They also make this a natural moment to ask a broader question: for domestic, everyday payments, could more of them travel on the account-to-account rails we have already built?
What it could look like
Picture a few ordinary moments.
A café or a local clinic. At the counter, the customer scans a code, sees the business name confirmed by their bank, and approves the payment with a tap in their banking app. The money arrives instantly. The business has no card fees to absorb and nothing to reconcile at the end of the day.
A monthly membership. A gym, a childcare centre or a tutoring school sets up a PayTo agreement once. The customer can see exactly what they’ve agreed to, change it or pause it themselves, and never has to update an expired card again. The business stops chasing failed payments.
An online checkout. Instead of typing in sixteen digits, the customer chooses “pay from my bank”, approves it in their banking app, and the order is confirmed in seconds. There is no card number to store, and nothing to leak.
A bill. A utility or council bill arrives with a PayTo request attached. One approval in the banking app, with limits the customer sets, and it’s done.
None of these needs new rails. They need the pieces we already have to come together into an experience that is as simple as tapping a card.
Why it matters
For customers, it means payments that are fast, visible and in their control, with the potential for lower prices over time as businesses spend less on payment costs.
For businesses, especially small ones, it means money that arrives instantly, lower acceptance costs, fewer failed recurring payments and simpler reconciliation. For a business on thin margins, a fraction of a per cent on every sale is real money.
For the industry, it means a stronger return on the significant investment already made in real-time infrastructure. Rails that carry more everyday payments become more valuable for everyone who built them.
And for the country, it means more choice and more competition in how we pay, which tends to be good for innovation and good for prices.
What would help
This isn’t a small task, and much good work is already under way. From where I sit, a few things would make a big difference:
- A checkout experience as simple as a card tap. If paying from your account takes more steps than tapping a card, most people won’t do it. The experience is everything.
- Consistency across banks. Customers shouldn’t need to think about which bank they’re with. The flow should feel the same everywhere.
- Confidence for customers. People trust cards partly because they know what happens if something goes wrong. Account-to-account payments need equally clear and simple answers on disputes and refunds.
- Easy adoption for merchants. Small businesses need it built into the terminals, invoicing tools and online platforms they already use, not as another system to manage.
- A clear story. Many Australians are still getting to know PayTo. A simple explanation of what it is and why it’s safe would go a long way.
The opportunity
Cards will continue to play an important role, and they should. This is not about replacing one way of paying with another. It’s about making sure Australians and Australian businesses can choose the rails that suit the payment.
The pieces are already here. The opportunity is in putting them together for everyday payments.
We built world-class infrastructure. Real-time movement, simple addressing and digital consent are all in place. Bringing them together into a simple, low-friction way to pay could save businesses and households significant money, and give the whole industry a better return on what it has already built.
That feels like an opportunity worth taking.
These are my personal views and do not represent the views of any employer or organisation I am associated with.