J.P. Morgan Payments, the payments services and paytech development arm of US banking giant J.P. Morgan Chase, has been announced as the newest member of the AP+ network.

Through its membership, the US payments giant will gain access to Australia’s domestic fast payments network, the New Payments Platform (NPP), as well as to EFTPOS’ online debit payments network for its customers.

J.P. Morgan Payments, a cross-border and multicurrency payments company and one of the world’s largest transactors of US dollar payments, offers treasury services, trade and working capital, card and merchant services capabilities.

Bianca Bates, J.P. Morgan’s head of payments for Australia and New Zealand said the payments firm’s membership of all AP+ schemes “strengthens our local footprint and will further enable us to bring the full strength of our business to our clients in the Australian market”.

AP+ chief executive Lynn Kraus welcomed the US payments firm as a direct participant in the NPP and EFTPOS, “further strengthening the diversity of our membership and bringing more competition to the market”.

“Matching the data-rich, account-to-account real-time payments rails of the NPP with the processing strength of EFTPOS’ infrastructure, directly accessing Australia’s domestic debit network makes sense,” Kraus added.

“We welcome J.P. Morgan Payments joining the NPP and look forward to working closely with them as they undertake the various steps required to go live as an NPP Participant.”

More than 100 banks, credit unions, building societies, fintechs and other organisations are connected to the NPP fast payments rail, which now accounts for around 1 in 3 account-to-account payments in Australia.

In April 2024 alone, the NPP delivered more than 133 million payments worth a total of $165.3 billion. The average daily payment value has increased to over $5 billion.