Probably collectively.

And has someone who has worked for Australian banks it is probably on the cheap side.

Many of the core systems that needed upgrading are old and there isn't necessarily the people around who worked on them. And so there are a lot of costs that go into upgrading.

It just seems absurd that it should be so complicated and expensive to build a system which on a basic level is just about maintaining a large table of numbers (the ledger of bank account balances) and doing simple arithmetic on it. And I say this as someone who develops banking systems for a living.

I think/hope the banking and financial sector in the future will be much more lean and optimized, both in terms of systems and management.

Apparently a lot of the cost and delay was making sure that the regulatory requirements for bank transfers were met. These are handled by APCA (Australian Payments Clearing Association), which is now Australian Payments Network Limited (AusPayNet)[0]. These transfers have traditionally been done over the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS). BECS is a dinosaur and I have a feeling that once you achieved agreement between the members of AusPayNet (about 120 members), met all regulations, tested the new system for reliability, performance and conformance, tested the new system for interoperability with BECS, made sure it didn't have any gaping holes that allowed fraud to take place and, finally, paid some serious money to all of the consultants and 3rd parties involved in the rollout, you'd easily approach the billion dollar mark.

This project has been underway for about 6 years now. Think of it as ~$166MM per year for the rollout. I agree that it would be nice if the Australian financial sector were lean and optimized in the future, but I don't hold out that much hope to be honest, despite other countries managing to achieve this.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Payments_Network

> on a basic level is just about maintaining a large table

The most dangerous word in software development.

Wow, that’s incredibly simplified. They have to have incredible uptime guarantees, transfer money from different banking systems, and ensure that amounts are never wrong. And we are talking millions of transactions a second here. And it has to be fully working and never make a mistake.

Not easy at all.

Australia doesn't do millions of transactions per second, that's absurd. Millions per day at most.

Millions per day is -definitely- incorrect.

> Millions per day is -definitely- incorrect.

Too many or too few?

It would be interesting to see a line item breakdown of that bill. I'd wager Oracle got a good $50 mill out of it (multi year).

It's SWIFT based.

Don't worry someone is still paying Oracle money.

Actually the SWIFT mostly runs on Oracle Tuxedo. Not sure if this is the case with the instant transfer.

Google what is bpay ;)

Personally I think a billion dollars for a nationally recognized electronic payment system is worth it. In the US the commercial solutions (venmo, paypal, etc) work fine between friends, but sometimes you get stuck having to write (paper) checks. There are several reasons this can happen:

- Some people are just old-school. I've had several landlords who barely understood the internet, good luck getting them to give their banking details to some trendy company in SF. I had one roommate who would routinely drive 30 minutes to drop off a check in my landlord's mailbox, for example. This wasn't secure, and if either my roommate or our landlord was traveling our rent payments would be late.

- Municipalities or government-supported entities are on unstable ground if they start playing favorite with private payment systems. Try getting a national lab to accept paypal, or the University of California to transfer reimbursement to an IBAN through TransferWise.

I imagine it would be even more complicated for cryptocurrencies. And in all cases, I can't say I blame people for asking for checks: it's often low-level clerks who have to do the work, why should they risk getting fired for your convenience? When the national standard is paper checks, having them stolen, arriving late, being forged, etc are all just "the price of doing business".

On the other hand, no matter how much you save your employer and increase client satisfaction by using something non-standard, you're on the chopping block if something goes wrong.

American is so far behind the rest of the world. Even before this, in Australia and New Zealand, I could pay anyone, direct bank-to-bank, with just their name and account number, within 24 hours.

Agreed. What this article doesn't mention is that the NPP is now the world's most sophisticated payment system. The things this thing can do is insane.

Look up "myki" on Wikipedia and "Australian nbn" and maybe Google for "Australian census meltdown". This is normal here.

A big reason for this system is tax.

The thought being if all payments in Australia are seamless and instant AND recorded, there will be no need for cash. Business will no longer be able to hide revenue.

They will make up this spend very quickly.

> there will be no need for cash.

There will always be need for cash, business who want to pay employees cash in hand and employees/immigrants who are desperate for jobs will accept less than minimum wage in cash

neither of these are acceptable government business reasons to keep cash

In the middle of the crypto currency bubble no less. The irony is string with this one.