Amex and Cuscal Give Australians Faster Way to Pay Card Bills

American Express and payments firm Cuscal have teamed to help Australian customers repay charges in minutes.

The partnership, announced Thursday (March 23), involves what American Express (Amex) says is the first card bill PayID service in Australia, using the country’s New Payments Platform (NPP) real-time payments system.

“American Express Card PayID enables our consumer and small business American Express Card Members to maximize their payment terms and increase their spending power through repayments that are reflected on their accounts in less than a minute,” Adam Roberts, the company’s vice president for emerging products and partnerships, said in a news release.

According to the release, the program gives consumers and small businesses more spending power, as credit is freed up in under a minute once payments are made.

By connecting with Cuscal and its APIs, American Express lets its card members create a unique PayID they can save as a payee in their digital banking channels.

“This means that when card members make a payment from their bank to their PayID it is routed in real time to their American Express Card account via Cuscal, creating an instant and seamless payment and a better customer experience,” the release said.

NPP went live in Australia in 2018, and — as noted here recently — processes more than $1 trillion across 1 billion transactions each year.

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, real-time payments “have reached unprecedented levels of demand over the past five years, yet they are still available to just a small number of businesses and consumers.”

Research has shown that instant payments account for just 2% of corporate disbursements sent and just 1.3% of payments received.

But there’s a growing interest among businesses — larger ones especially — in developing faster payment capabilities, with 89% of companies with revenues above the billion-dollar mark saying that real-time payment capabilities are important.

And 69% of businesses across the board have plans to expand their real-time payment capabilities — if they aren’t doing so already — many with the assistance of FinTechs and financial institutions that leverage the real-time payments network.

PYMNTS spoke last week with a group of payments professionals about the impending launch of FedNow, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s answer to Australia’s NPP.

As instant payments become more ubiquitous, the consumer hesitation to make them a key feature of their financial lives will be short-lived. Businesses will shift away from checks and wires and discover that straight-through processing will transform commercial payments, said Meghan Oakes, VP head of products and services enterprise payments Americas at FIS.

“And in two years hence, instant payments will be every conversation … we’re going to need to be agile enough to keep up with the demands of the industry,” added Dan Baum, head of payments product at FedNow.