Under a week ago, BTCMarkets.net, one of the Melbourne, Australia based crypto exchanges announced on Twitter here that they have dropped POLI pay support.
I've been of two minds about POLI pay. On one hand, it was the fastest way to send fiat currency to an exchange, typically arriving within a few minutes of the transaction. It also allowed a higher daily transfer limit when combined with BPAY.
On the other hand, it was indistinguishable from a phishing scheme and I am fundamentally against providing username and password information to a 3rd party. That said, I'm not all that sad to see it go as I've heard such complaints from those in the IT security field.
The tweet additionally mentioned the "New Payments Platform" as something that BTCMarkets is looking at adopting. A crude looking website is available at www.nppa.com.au. It is a 24/7 365 payment platform that I suspect has been introduced partly thanks to the availability that the crypto innovation has provided us. In comparison, the banking system is hideously slow so this increase in availability has likely been market driven.
Learn (a little) more about the NPP with this high level video from the NPP website.
Another NPP feature is the ability to supposedly not only attach text to transfers but also entire documents. That looks like a neat feature. Transfers are apparently possible without needing to remember account numbers and facilitates not only one to one but one to many payment methodologies.
The video linked above attributes NPP to industry collaboration and intimates that it will be used not only in financial circles within Australia but in Government as well. I'm waiting to learn more about it but see no evidence of it being decentralised and if it's the case that it's a bank product, I'm not particularly interested.
On the other hand, another way to move fiat into the crypto space via exchanges is a welcome development. We shall have to wait and see, but for now BPAY is the only way to load fiat into BTC Markets... a drop in the feature set offered by the exchange.
Thanks for reading and I will keep you posted.