Instant payments, less downtime: How real-time will redefine resilience

The movement of payment volumes from Australia’s Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) to the New Payments Platform (NPP) is more than a technology upgrade – it’s a fundamental reset of operational expectations. Daily batch cycles are giving way to 24/7 real-time payments, dramatically raising the bar for uptime, speed and accuracy.

Our previous articles explored readiness and practical actions for banks and corporates. This piece we delve into the resilience required to operate  – and compete – in a real-time payments’ ecosystem.

Proactively address new areas of vulnerability

Under CPS 230, financial institutions must now prove they can operate, recover and manage service providers effectively in a continuous, always-on payments environment. That demands new capabilities to strengthen key areas, including:

• Security, fraud and cyber

As payment flows move to real-time, the window for detecting and preventing fraud reduces dramatically. In response, institutions need to strengthen authentication and behavioural analytics, adopt zero-trust architecture and secure APIs and data through tokenisation. Lessons from the UK’s Faster Payments and SEPA Instant schemes make it clear that collaboration between banks, Payment Service Providers (PSPs) and regulators is critical. Shared intelligence and coordinated response frameworks enhance collective defences.

• Third- and fourth-party dependencies

Resilience depends as much on external stability as on internal controls. The real-time payments environment is highly interconnected, spanning Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, PSPs, cloud providers and data aggregators. Institutions need to embed resilience requirements in supplier contracts, setting standards for redundancy, uptime and incident response. Third-party risk management should include clearly defined exit strategies that articulate:

• Which services each vendor supports
• Who the critical fourth parties are
• What thresholds would trigger an exit
• How those indicators are monitored
• How a rapid or planned transition to an alternative provider would occur

Joint industry simulations and coordinated drills, involving multiple ecosystem participants and the NPP operator, can also strengthen readiness. Mitigating systemic risk requires understanding how a single point of failure – a data feed, API gateway or ERP interface – could cascade through the ecosystem.

Prioritise testing, validation and continuous improvement.

True resilience is demonstrated through testing – not documentation. Static disaster-recovery plans must evolve into ongoing assurance programs that stress-test end-to-end services, including  systems, people and processes. This means going beyond technical failover tests and exercising a wide range of severe but plausible scenarios, such as the loss of key Australian Financial Market Infrastructures, failure of critical third-party payment applications, ransomware events that encrypt client data, or outages affecting core payment-initiation channels like online banking and mobile apps. 

End-to-end  scenario testing exercises, including simulated NPP outages or data-corruption scenarios, will help institutions to test recovery speeds and customer-impact responses, and validate communication protocols. Internal and cross-industry crisis communication frameworks are critical when disruptions occur. Institutions will need to participation in regulator-style, industry-wide stress tests to benchmark capability, share learnings and drive maturity across the payments ecosystem.

Automate recovery and move to resilient-by-design architecture

In a world with no off time, manual interventions are too slow. Real-time payment flows need automated recovery mechanisms. Institutions will also need to recalibrate Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).

To maintain service continuity when seconds matter, payment platforms should be resilient-by-design. That means:

• Supporting graceful degradation rather than hard failure
• Automating switchovers and failovers where possible
• Clearly articulating how each critical service responds under stress
• Using built-in redundancy to keep essential services running even during component degradations

Clarify the end-to-end support model

The technical capability for instant payments can quickly be undermined by operational constraints. For example, many institutions risk developing mismatches in support coverage if their payments systems are classified as critical services but their core banking or supporting systems are not. This creates gaps that undermine resilience. A strong end-to-end support model should:

• Clearly map the entire payments flow
• Identify all dependencies, including systems not traditionally considered “critical”
• Uplift SLAs across all support teams to match 24/7 expectations and implement end-to-end service observability
• Coordinate across teams to ensure issues are triaged and resolved to real-time standards

Resilience as an innovation enabler

The migration offers the payments ecosystem a powerful opportunity to define resilience – not as a compliance burden – but as a catalyst for innovation. A robust, secure and transparent payments environment unlocks the ability to launch new data-rich payment services, deliver consistently reliable customer experiences with instant confirmation and build the kind of trust that becomes a competitive differentiator.

As Australia moves closer to migration, resilience must also be understood as a shared responsibility. Banks, corporates, regulators and service providers all have critical roles to play in creating a payments ecosystem that is both stable and agile.

How Baringa can help

Baringa has deep experience supporting financial institutions through operational resilience, payments transformation and regulatory uplift. We can help you to assess resilience maturity, redesign end-to-end operating models, strengthen third-party risk management, and build robust real-time recovery capabilities aligned to CPS 230 expectations. We also offer hands-on delivery, working with your teams to design and implement the resilient payment architectures, controls and support models needed to operate confidently in a real-time world.