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 ;)