3 ways real-time payments improve business efficiency

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The New Payments Platform (NPP) supports a 24/7 digital economy. It works by moving money in real-time between bank accounts. The NPP gives users faster payments, simpler payment IDs (PayIDs) and more detailed transfer descriptions. It holds significant benefits for businesses and consumers. Here are three reasons why real-time payments improve business efficiency:

1. A better customer experience

Initially, you could only transfer money to other bank accounts using a BSB and account number. These transfers would typically then take a few business days to reach the other bank account. With NPP, all you need is your email address or phone number to transfer money to another account and it will appear within minutes.

There are two components to NPP that make transfers faster. Firstly, the process of actually sending money is much quicker, as the customer doesn’t have to worry about finding the right BSB or account number, and then double or triple check it to ensure that their money goes to the right place. Secondly, because of integrations with other elements of the NPP such as Osko, transfers via PayID are processed almost immediately and on a 24/7 basis, meaning customers will spend less time waiting for a transaction to go through, greatly streamlining the customer experience.

2. Overtake competition

For businesses processing payments via NPP, customers will be able to make real-time payments to anyone with a NPP-linked account at any NPP-ready financial institution. This will give businesses the chance to overtake any of their competitors that are slower to adapt.

Naturally, this has had a significant impact on improving payment experiences for companies, especially those within the lending industry. One of the key features of NPP is that it facilitates faster, instant payments and shares data between different bank accounts with ease. With the rollout of open banking, all these factors present a wealth of new opportunities for financial service providers.

One of the biggest benefits of NPP is that it’s helped further automate business processes, giving businesses the leverage to increase customer reach and work on other features within their systems to create an experience that is as seamless as possible for their customers

3. Convenient payment reconciliation

With NPP, both business and consumer bank account holders are expected to have far greater flexibility, thanks to multiple changes to the past BSB and account number only transaction systems.

Instead of relying on a BSB for identification, businesses can now create a new PayID using their existing phone number, email address or even an ABN number. The existing 18 character transaction description limit has also been increased to 280 characters.

One of the key benefits of NPP is its speed. But with speedier payments, businesses also need faster reconciliation tools.

Creating a unique BSB and account number for each of your customers makes reconciliation easy. You will always know who paid you. Monoova calls this feature ‘Automatcher’. Automatcher automates reconciliation of large volumes of incoming transactions and eliminates orphan transactions. Automatcher enables the client to create large numbers of unique bank-account numbers. The client can then associate these unique bank-account numbers with their individual customers.

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