Issue 7

In the last few years, BPAY has been looking at ways to expand access of the BPAY service to allow BPAY payments to be made from organizations that hold value accounts for customers but are not Authorised Deposit Taking Institutions (ADIs), such as church funds or credit providers. March 2009 marked two years since BPAY first introduced PIMs (Payer Institution Members), a new level of Scheme membership for these organizations.

BPAY currently has 13 live PIMs, with another six due to come on stream in August. This number far exceeds initial BPAY targets, which aimed for a total of six PIMs online within two years.

PIMs membership is open to a broad scope of organizations. PIMs that are live include church funds, mortgage originators and credit providers.

Payments made from PIMs have grown steadily over the past 12 months, increasing by 4,000 payments per month since June 2008. In April 2009 alone, over 20,000 BPAY payments worth more than $20 million were made via PIMs.

As with making a BPAY payment through a financial institution, customers can make any type of BPAY payment from a PIM, including credit card bills, council rates, household bills and even B2B payments.

PIMs benefit Billers in a number of ways, most noticeably by increasing the amount of consumers able to access and make payments via BPAY. Thanks to PIMs, Biller payments can also be made from a greater number of locations and types of funds.

The introduction of PIM membership was driven by BPAY's member organisations, after the identification of an opportunity to improve the Scheme. BPAY continually reviews its systems and organisational structure in order to maintain the highest standard of service, and welcomes input from all Billers on ways in which the Scheme can be improved.