What is more important. Payment Speed or Information?

Not all faster payments are fast.  Sometimes payments can be quite slow. Sure the payment may get to the destination quickly, but it may lack the necessary information needed to do anything with it.

For an individual receiving a payment, this is usually not a problem. You usually know what the payment is, even if it does lack reference information.

For a company however that needs to deal with a large number of receipts this can be a problem. They will rely on the reference information that comes with the payment. If that reference is limited or missing, it can take a long time to “receive” or receipt the payment. This causes the payment to become a slow and potentially a costly payment, due to the fact it will now require manual intervention to get processed.

Information with Payment

Australia has been suffering for sometime with payment information. The old Direct Entry Payment service allowed a maximum of 18 characters of data to be sent with the payment. With OSKO’s new Credit Transfer service, that limit has been broken.

When you send money, or receive it, it’s good to know what it’s for. With Osko Payments you get 280 characters to describe it, so you can really go to town! And you don’t even have to stick with words either😀😃😄😁😆😆 .

Use of ISO 20022 messaging

The capacity for more information comes from the uplift in the data formats used to transfer payments between the banks.

Fortunately for us, when NPP was being designed they turned to international standards that have solved these data problems before. Specifically the transfer between the banks now use a ISO20022 pacs.008 message.

Consumers Get Creative

How many ways can tell someone here is your f%$& money? You may be surprised to learn this is not that uncommon in payment references.

With the current Pay Anyone system you are limited to 18 characters and in that character set you can use about 70 characters (upper / lower case , numbers and a few special characters).

With OSKO payments, you have available most of the UTF8 character set. There are over 1M characters that you can use. So ..

Thanks for orgainising the 🍕 here is your 🤑

Transforming your business reconciliation

Some of the real benefits of the the NPP and the Faster Payments network will be the clarity over the reference data that can be provided with the payment.

When a company issues an invoice, they expect (hope) to see that invoice number back in the payment reference when they get paid. If they don’t receive that reference, it will cause reconciliation problems and manual handling.

The situation is not helped when the old payment system limits you to only 18 characters. If the company making the payment is paying several invoices or there were adjustments / disputes, 18 characters is woefully inadequate to express what is going on.

What ends up happening is that the company making the payment will put a new generated reference number on the payment and then send an email or post a letter describing what was paid. You can image some of the manual processes involved here. This is a very slow payment.

Now with the NPP Faster Payment rails, we have room to put all that information with the payment. With 280 characters, this is more then enough for most business to explain what invoices are being paid and what adjustments / discounts have been taken. Making the overall payment experience faster.