Published on the 30/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Fewer than half of all Australian organisations accept electronic payments suggesting there is still a lot of room for financial disruption and business reform…
A survey of over 600 Australian organisations conducted by Roy Morgan Research and commissioned by HCL Technologies, has found that just 45 percent of Australian businesses currently accept electronic payments (excluding direct payments) using credit or debit cards, PayPal or digital wallets.
While six percent of businesses accept only electronic payments, 55 percent don’t accept them at all. And there seems relatively muted consumer enthusiasm for new forms of electronic payments. Asked what new payments methods customers had asked to use, 26 percent of survey respondents nominated PayPal, while just 0.4 percent pointed to digital wallets – almost as low as the 0.3 percent wanting to pay with virtual currencies such as Bitcoin.
Cash, it seems, is far from dead.
Nevertheless electronic payments remain a focus of enterprise activity in Australia, given the nation has commissioned SWIFT to develop its real-time New Payments Platform intended to speed settlement and take costs and friction out of payments when it launches in late 2017.
HCL’s Sydney-based principal of payments, Mitch Green predicted yesterday that Australia’s banks alone will spend $3 billion updating their information systems in readiness for the NPP. Not only will they need core banking platforms able to handle real-time payments, but also real-time fraud and anti-money laundering monitoring he warned.
According to Green, while the NPP is still at a very early phase in its development it has the potential to “be a real game changer especially for medium and small businesses”.
The Roy Morgan survey however found that just one in 20 organisations were properly aware of the NPP and its implications, although there was heightened understanding of the NPP in the financial, manufacturing and accommodation and food services sectors.
Green said that organisations were still waiting for the NPP “rule book” to be released which will set out how the system will operate and detail any transaction limits that may apply. While some basics are already known – the platform will be built using the ISO 20022 standard for example – Green said that more detail was expected at the end of the year.
