🇦🇺 Payments in Oceania and Canada

Three major markets and an archipelago: the lay of the land

Australia, New Zealand, and Canada run three entirely separate national payment systems, with no common currency, no common regulator, and no shared scheme. Yet their architectures share the same skeleton, which is why the same integration mistakes keep recurring across them. That skeleton has three parts. A strong domestic debit scheme born in the 1980s carries in-person payments, under the names eftpos, EFTPOS, and Interac. A bulk clearing system with deferred settlement still carries most recurring payments: BECS and the ACSS. A late-arriving instant rail completes the picture: live in Australia since 2018, still only announced in Canada, and nonexistent in New Zealand.

In all three markets, the cost of card acceptance comes from a decision by a public authority, not from negotiation between merchants and their acquirers. The Reserve Bank of Australia has capped interchange since 2003 and will ban surcharging from October 1, 2026. New Zealand's Commerce Commission issues binding network standards under the Retail Payment System Act 2022. Canada's Department of Finance secured voluntary commitments from Visa and Mastercard aimed at small businesses. The three legal instruments differ: a central bank standard, a competition authority standard, and a commitment negotiated under regulatory threat. All three set the price of acceptance outside the commercial contract. A merchant looking for the applicable rate schedule therefore reads a document published by the authority. The contract with its acquirer operates within those limits.

Australia: the NPP and its Osko, PayID, and PayTo overlays

The New Payments Platform (NPP) is Australia's interbank infrastructure for real-time retail payments. It went live in 2018. It is operated by NPP Australia, now a subsidiary of Australian Payments Plus (AP+), the industry holding company formed in 2022 by merging eftpos, BPAY, and NPP Australia. Its messaging is native ISO 20022: the format was chosen when the system was designed, not adopted later through a migration from an older standard. Its extended data field allows several thousand characters of remittance information per payment, compared with 18 on BECS.

The NPP is infrastructure, not a product an end customer signs up for. It carries and settles individual payments in seconds, 24 hours a day, and that is the extent of its scope. What an Australian customer sees in a banking app are the overlays (overlay services), which sit on top of that infrastructure and each have their own brand name. Foreign documentation routinely confuses the two layers. A merchant that asks its bank for “an NPP integration” will find no matching product, because it has not named the overlay that will initiate the payment.

Two NPP upgrade projects are underway. The ISO 20022 message version upgrade and richer NPP message data are both expected by the end of 2026. A further capacity increase is planned for 2027. AP+ planned to put a vision for Australian account-to-account payments out for public consultation in April 2026 (Australian Payments Plus, 2026). Field mappings an integrator builds today will therefore need rework, on a timeline the operator publishes in advance.

Australia's foundation: BECS, BPAY, and settlement in RITS

BECS (Bulk Electronic Clearing System), also called Direct Entry, is Australia's ACH. It clears bulk credit transfers, payroll, welfare payments, and direct debits. Operated by AusPayNet, it dates from 1994. It still carries most of the country's recurring payments, and payroll vendors and billers integrate it by default rather than the NPP. Its limitations reflect its age: processing runs in daily batches, the reference field is capped at 18 characters, no real-time status is available, and there is no exchange on weekends.

BECS was supposed to be phased out in favor of the NPP. When its shutdown date was withdrawn, it became the textbook counterexample for forced migrations of bulk rails, and the timeline is worth following in detail. In Australia, it is routinely cited against any proposed cutoff date for an existing system.

BPAY, launched in 1997, is an Australian bill payment system that the payer initiates from online banking. No other market has a direct equivalent. The biller gives the payer a biller code and a customer reference number (CRN), which the payer enters in their banking app. Reconciliation is therefore guaranteed by design: the payer supplies the reference, instead of the creditor piecing it together after the fact. BPAY has more than 95,000 billers and more than 140 participating financial institutions (Australian Payments Plus, 2026).

RITS (Reserve Bank Information and Transfer System) is Australia's RTGS system. It has run since 1998, and every other system ultimately settles in it. The RBA is its owner, operator, and overseer, with separate reporting lines for oversight and operations. RITS receives wholesale payments through HVCS and Austraclear. Every morning at 9 a.m., it settles the retail systems' batches on a deferred net basis: BECS, the card schemes, and BPAY. Any institution that wants to settle directly in Australia must hold a settlement account in RITS.

eftpos, least-cost routing, and the end of surcharging

Almost every Australian debit card carries two networks: the domestic scheme eftpos, rolled out from the 1980s and now operated by Australian Payments Plus, and an international network, Visa Debit or Debit Mastercard. The chip holds two separate applications, each with its own fee schedule, rather than two brands under a single acceptance contract. The network used is chosen through least-cost routing (LCR), also called merchant choice routing. The acquirer routes the contactless transaction to the cheaper network, on the merchant's instructions. The cardholder has no say. This is the exact opposite of the regulatory choice for co-badged cards in Europe, where the customer picks the network. Turning on LCR is therefore the first cost saving available to an Australian merchant, before any renegotiation of its acquiring fees.

• Check that LCR is turned on for every MID and every terminal fleet: it is not always on by default, especially on older contracts.
• Check the scope: LCR in store, LCR on mobile wallets, LCR online. These are three separate rollouts with three separate dates.
• Check the pricing model: under blended pricing, the acquirer keeps the routing savings and the merchant never sees them. LCR only pays off under interchange plus plus.
• Measure the actual routing rate in acquirer reports, not the box ticked in the contract: a misconfigured terminal or a card that is not dual-network falls out of scope without any alert.

On March 31, 2026, the RBA published the Conclusions Paper of its Review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging, the third phase of its review of retail payments regulation. It is the most sweeping overhaul of the Australian framework since interchange caps were introduced in 2003. It changes two rules that had stood for 20 years: the level of the interchange caps, and merchants' right to surcharge card payments.

New Zealand: EFTPOS, Payments NZ, and no instant rail

New Zealand's EFTPOS is the national card payment system at the point of sale. It debits the cardholder's account directly and carries no merchant fee. It became widespread in the 1980s, earlier than in most developed markets, and it has shaped the country's acceptance economics ever since. New Zealand long had the lowest acceptance costs in the OECD. It never needed an instant retail rail, because the domestic debit card already did that job. EFTPOS is now losing ground to contactless payments on the international networks, which are more convenient for cardholders and far more expensive for merchants. That shift is the source of all the regulation described below.

New Zealand's EFTPOS is defined by a set of interbank rules, not by a card scheme in the usual sense. The CECS (Consumer Electronic Clearing System) rules, issued by Payments NZ, govern EFTPOS and mobile payments. Payments NZ writes the rules for the country's four clearing systems but does not own the infrastructure that runs them. That model is fundamentally different from an operator like Interac or AP+, which runs the systems it writes the rules for.

A switch is the system that routes each transaction from the terminal to the cardholder's bank and returns the authorization. New Zealand is one of the very few developed markets where two competing switches operate under a single set of rules. Worldline NZ, founded in 1989 as Paymark, processes more than 1.5 billion transactions a year and serves all the major banks. EFTPOS New Zealand (ENZ) is a Verifone subsidiary; Verifone's purchase of it from ANZ Bank New Zealand was announced in late 2012 and closed in 2013. Australia's Cuscal announced its acquisition of Worldline New Zealand in 2025, putting critical New Zealand infrastructure under foreign ownership. The switch rebuild is estimated at about A$21 million, with completion targeted for 2030 (interest.co.nz / Worldline, 2025).

Without an instant rail, New Zealand turned to API-based payment initiation as a substitute for immediate payments, and that choice shapes the whole market. The API Centre, set up within Payments NZ in 2019, publishes the API standards for payment initiation, account information, and event notification. It also sets the operating rules and the accreditation requirements for third parties. In 2025, the country moved from an industry-led model to a statutory regime. The Customer and Product Data Act 2025 creates a right of access to data, with banking as the first designated sector, overseen by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE).

The Retail Payment System Act and the push to rein in costs

The Retail Payment System Act 2022 is the New Zealand law that brings the cost of accepting retail payments under regulation. Instead of writing rate schedules into the statute itself, it gives the Commerce Commission, the competition authority, the power to issue binding network standards. The regulator can therefore revise the caps without going back to Parliament. EU law takes the opposite approach: interchange rates are set in a regulation. This delegation explains how quickly New Zealand's rate schedules have changed since 2022.

A third workstream is moving in parallel. In 2026, the MBIE consulted on payment services regulation, that is, a licensing and supervision framework for non-bank providers. New Zealand has no such regime today, which sets it clearly apart from Canada and its RPAA. Payments NZ responded to the consultation by calling for “a clearer and better coordinated framework” for payment service providers (Payments NZ, July 6, 2026). That legislation will determine the status of firms operating in New Zealand without a banking license.

Canada: Interac, the scheme that holds the country together

Interac Corp. is Canada's domestic payment scheme. It runs point-of-sale debit, alias-based retail transfers, and an identity verification service that is gradually turning it into a digital identity provider. It started in 1984 as an interbank association and merged with Acxsys in 2018 to form the current company, owned by banks, credit unions, acquirers, and merchants. No domestic scheme in any other English-speaking market holds a comparable position. Any debit acceptance or retail transfer setup in Canada has to run under its rules.

For credit interchange, Canada uses a tool that is neither a statutory cap nor private antitrust litigation. Voluntary commitments from Visa and Mastercard, secured by the Department of Finance, have applied since October 19, 2024. They lower the average interchange rate to 0.95% for card-present transactions, with a 0.1 percentage point cut for e-commerce. They cover merchants with up to C$300,000 in annual Visa sales or C$175,000 in annual Mastercard sales. About 90% of card-accepting merchants qualify, with cuts of up to 27%, or even 37% for some profiles (Department of Finance Canada, 2024; CFIB, 2024). The sales threshold also defines who is left out. Large merchants get nothing, because their volumes put them above the thresholds.

Canada's rails: Lynx, ACSS, USBE, and the Real-Time Rail

Payments Canada operates three systems under the Canadian Payments Act, overseen by the Bank of Canada. Lynx is the RTGS system, in service since 2021. It was built on ISO 20022 from day one, with settlement in central bank money and a liquidity-saving mechanism. The ACSS is the retail clearing system, set up in 1984. It handles checks, automated funds transfers (AFT), and Interac debit, with next-day settlement in Lynx. The USBE is the third system, rarely mentioned in accounts of the Canadian market. It clears, in batches, payments drawn on US dollar accounts held at institutions in Canada.

The lingering weight of checks, at C$2,700 billion a year, is a Canadian peculiarity that few comparable markets share. Accounts payable software sold in Canada without check handling is an incomplete product. Credit cards also play a much larger role than average, driven by rich rewards programs. The Canadian market thus combines two models: the US model for credit, and the European model for its domestic debit scheme.

Two more pieces complete the picture, one in post-trade and one in digital currency. The Bank of Canada designates two post-trade infrastructures as systemically important, alongside Lynx. CDSX, the central securities depository and securities settlement system, handles more than 2.1 million trades a day, according to CDS. The Canadian Derivatives Clearing Service is the central counterparty for the Montréal Exchange. On digital currency, the Bank of Canada scaled back its work on a retail digital Canadian dollar after the 2020–2023 design and consultation phase. It has shifted its resources to PSP supervision and cross-border payments. No production project is currently underway.

The Pacific islands, and the decisions to make before operating in the region

Beyond Australia and New Zealand, Oceania has some 15 island nations whose payment infrastructure is organized on the opposite principle from the large markets. The central bank runs the system itself, often combining the RTGS, bulk clearing, and the national switch on a single platform. Elsewhere, industry builds the infrastructure and the regulator oversees it. Two factors explain this choice. The markets are too small for a private operator to recoup the cost of infrastructure, and financial inclusion is a matter of public policy there, not a business case.

• CellMoni (Digicel Financial Services PNG), the leading telecom-run mobile money service in Papua New Guinea, connected to the national switch.
• MiCash (Nationwide Microbank, known as MiBank), mobile money run by a microbank rather than a telecom operator and aimed at rural areas: a different model from CellMoni.
• Wantok Moni (Bank of South Pacific) and KinaKonnect (Kina Bank), the mobile banking services of PNG's two largest banks, interoperable through REPS.
• M-PAiSA (Vodafone Fiji), Fiji's first mobile money service, interoperable 24/7 with bank accounts since it joined FIJICLEAR in 2024.
• MyCash (Digicel Pacific), Fiji's second wallet, integrated with FIJICLEAR and the platform behind the Pacific Transfers cross-border service.

Decisions to make before entering the region