PayID might be four years old, but consumer awareness of it as a payment method is really only mainstreaming now. It’s offered by more than 100 participating banks, credit unions, and building societies. The New Payments Platform [NPP] has just registered its 10 millionth PayID, and there are close to 100 million PayID payments being processed every month, accounting for 32% of all account-to-account credit payments in Australia.
It’s taken a while for Australian consumers to embrace PayID as a payment method, but I believe its moment is here. They’re seeing it more and more at checkouts and in banking apps, and the consumer base is growing quickly.
PayID is a brilliant tool created by the NPP. It enables instant, secure, data-rich transfer of value from one bank account to another. For any business that needs to move cleared funds fast, needs to know exactly who those funds are from, and reconcile things efficiently - it’s beautiful. It suits simple transactions as well as sophisticated end-to-end embedded payment solutions. Our merchant partners love it.
Many of those merchant partners are now seeing PayID as a replacement for BPAY, which I think is super exciting. We know that BPAY is a popular payment method, but it is comparatively slow and expensive. We’re helping merchants use PayID to provide the same service instantly, at a fraction of the cost in a more user-friendly way, too.
Zepto’s approach to PayID is a great example of how we build innovation on top of basic payments infrastructure. We don’t simply proxy a base solution or functionality. What’s the point of that?
As flexible and robust as PayID is, it’s not perfect for every use case in its basic form.
For example, we quickly saw that enterprises like crypto exchanges and other platforms would likely have demands for PayID at scale and during surges that exceeded the infrastructure as built. Everywhere we looked in our competitive space, we saw solutions that were simple proxies of the base NPP infrastructure.
So, we asked ourselves, how can we bridge that gap for merchants in a really elegant, easy way?
Our innovation over the top of the base PayID offering means we’ve done the heavy-lifting for merchants seeking solutions that exceed the raw offering from the NPP.
So, we’re able to say to customers now, Yes. You can have everything described on the tin, your payments will settle in under a second, plus we can give it to you at any scale.
On top of that, too, we’ve built in real-time reporting. So if there’s an outage somewhere in the payment flow, we will know about it. The NPP has never gone down, but an entity connected to it––like a bank-–might have an outage. Zepto’s reporting enables us to identify and report on the source of the disruption in real time.
None of that reporting is built into the base infrastructure, it’s something that we built for our merchants. Our merchant partners use that information to communicate to affected customers, and deliver an awesome customer experience rather than the unhappy path of calls from customers anxious about what’s happened to their money.
In essence, we’ve taken the base real-time payment rail from the NPP, and wrapped it in smarts and scalability to take it to another level. That’s how we approach everything at Zepto.
It’s a customer-first, customer-centric approach that gives us an edge. Not surprisingly, our customers love us for it.
Next up in our Zepto Team Spotlight series is Zubin Henner. Not only does Zubin play a pivotal role in keeping Zepto running in his role as a Team Leader & Senior Software Engineer, he also has a genuine (and hotly contested) claim to being the first, non-founding team member to join the company. He also happens to be one of the nicest human beings on the planet.
Read more
With the launch of a game-changing payment innovation — PayTo — who should be responsible for bringing Australians up to speed about its benefits? It’s a question we’ve been asking consumers in our research program.
Read more