Streamlining payments for businesses and governments in real-time
A unique Westpac payments platform is making real-time payments for large organisations seamless and safe.
A new weapon to counter the inexorable scourge of scams is the first of many game-changing innovations on the way for governments and big businesses as Australia’s real-time payments revolution picks up pace.
September sees the launch of Westpac Verify for PaymentsPlus, an anti-scam technology that will enable users to run a check on payee details before initiating payments, alerting them to potential account number and name mismatches.
This powerful new offering brings together the strengths of Westpac’s security and payments technology with its market leading payables platform, PaymentsPlus, to help institutional and government clients avoid costly scams and mistaken payments as the new era of real-time payments moves ahead.
“We're combining two of the bank's key strategic assets for the business and institutional markets,” says Chris Campbell, Executive Director, Head of New Payments & Payments Policy at Westpac – and enhanced security is just the inaugural step on the seamless real-time journey.
Next generation platform
PaymentsPlus is unique in the Australian market for making all the key payables tools – direct credit, real-time gross settlement (RTGS), BPAY and Osko – available in one platform, along with key connectivity options; a basic user interface, host-to-host via APIs (application programming interfaces) and batch uploads.
“Businesses get the best outcomes available in the Australian payments system all in one place,” says Campbell. “It means our clients can readily make the most of the numerous benefits of real-time payments, including faster cash flow, more effective liquidity management, better customer experience, and enhanced security.
“With the 2030 target date to shift from batch processing of direct entry payments to real-time, the PaymentsPlus channel will become increasingly crucial as our clients make the switch,” he says, adding: “What’s important is they can move at their own pace.”
A pipeline of innovations is on the way, including making the batch Osko module available to business and institutional clients, PayID lookups.
“If a customer has truly embraced real-time payments and they’re doing host-to-host business transactions, or if they want to upload payments batches to us via APIs or the portal, that will be available to them,” Campbell explains.
In the first step, Verify for PaymentsPlus will make Westpac Verify available to big business through the platform’s basic user interface in late September, with the full connectivity options (APIs and batch lookup) following in the next quarter. The move both reinforces Westpac’s status as an innovator in the payments security space and delivers additional protections across Australia’s main payments options.
It's worth noting that Westpac Verify, which launched for individuals and small businesses in April, has saved more than AUD 50 million* in scams and mistaken payments to date.
Confirmation of Payee (CoP), a security initiative now under development through a collaboration of Australian financial institutions, also will be added to the platform once it becomes available in 2025.
Security suite
Westpac Verify for PaymentsPlus is designed to help businesses and government agencies to reduce scam losses, including around fake invoice or payment redirection fraud involving business email compromise, and make it harder place for scammers to operate in Australia.
It’s the latest in a suite of payments security tools, including Westpac SaferPay (which presents customers with a series of questions in instances where a payment is considered a high risk of being a scam); cryptocurrency and merchant blocks for high-risk transactions involving digital currency exchanges or payments to businesses; and call-spoofing measures that prevent scammers from impersonating the bank’s phone numbers.
Over the past two years, Westpac across its business, has saved customers more than AUD 400 million* from being lost to scammers and has invested more than AUD 100 million in new detection and prevention measures, including initiatives delivered as part of the Scam Safe Accord.
Chief Executive, Westpac Institutional Bank, Nell Hutton says the rollout of Westpac Verify for PaymentsPlus highlights the bank’s commitment to protect its large business and government clients and has the potential “to save them millions, as well as create operational efficiency when setting up or changing payee details in their accounts payable systems.”
“International scammers target Australian businesses and government agencies that make large payments and often pay multiple invoices in batches. When scammers manage to steal funds from these organisations, the damages are significant and can have knock-on impacts for their customers and suppliers,” Hutton says.
Westpac’s initiative comes as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) advises that Australians reported losing AUD 16.2 million to payment redirection scams last year. Despite the total number of reports to its Scamwatch site decreasing by 28 per cent, the total amount lost rose by 3 per cent, indicating that Australians lost significantly more money per scam last year compared with 2022.
Campbell says the security threat around payments is “relentless”.
“You’ve got to wonder who you can trust these days,” he says. “We hear some horror stories and I talk about it being like hand-to-hand combat with the bad guys. As soon as we remove a banking friction somewhere, the scammer goes, ‘Well, you’ve done that, now you’ve also made it easier for me too’, so we need to build a better protection’. And that's what we're doing here with Westpac Verify for PaymentsPlus. We’re building a better security tool for our customers.”
Time-saving technology
Campbell says the immediate key focus is ensuring that potential clients understand the value they will receive from Westpac Verify for PaymentsPlus that aligns with the wider operational benefits of the platform.
He notes that internal scam-detection efforts for businesses can be incredibly time-consuming. “It can take businesses days to manage their due-diligence processes,” Campbell says. “This will help them shrink that haystack in terms of what they really need to focus on when their systems identify red flags.”
Campbell says the signup process will be easy for existing Westpac customers, while he encourages other businesses and government agencies to contact the bank to discuss the new payments security offering and learn more about the streamlined convenience of the all-encompassing Payments Plus platform.
* This figure is based on internal Westpac reviews.
For more information on PaymentsPlus, visit www.paymentsplus.westpac.com.au .
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