TL;DR
If you're setting up payments for Australia and reaching for POLi, stop, it's gone. POLi shut down on 30 September 2023, and a lot of guides still haven't caught up. The real question isn't what replaced it (nothing did, directly). It's what Australian buyers and businesses actually use now, and the answer splits cleanly between accepting money and paying it out.
Here's the current state of play.
What happened to POLi
POLi let shoppers pay by bank transfer without a card. It worked by screen scraping, logging into the customer's online banking on their behalf to move the money. That model was always uneasy with the banks, who tightened their stance against credential sharing, and POLi closed on 30 September 2023.
There is no like-for-like successor. So the practical answer for consumer checkout is not "find the new POLi." It's to lean on what Australian shoppers already use.
If you're selling into Australia
For consumer checkout, cards and digital wallets carry Australian retail, online and in person. Australians are heavy card and mobile-wallet users, and that's what a checkout aimed at Australian buyers needs first.
One thing to watch: card surcharging is under RBA review. The rules around whether and how merchants can pass card costs to customers are being reconsidered, so the economics of card acceptance in Australia may shift. It's worth tracking if cards are a big share of your Australian volume, but it doesn't change the basic answer that cards and wallets are how Australian consumers pay.
If you're paying into Australia
Business payments are a different picture, and this is where the modern rails matter.
The New Payments Platform (NPP) is Australia's real-time account-to-account rail. It settles fast and carries richer data with each payment, which makes reconciliation cleaner than the older batch system. For disbursements, payroll, supplier payments, refunds, it's mature and ready.
PayID sits on top of the NPP as an addressing layer. Instead of a BSB and account number, a payment can be addressed to a phone number, email, or an ABN. The ABN option is the interesting one for business: addressing a supplier payment to their ABN reduces the misdirection risk that comes with manually keyed account numbers. PayID has more than 11 million registrations, though most NPP traffic still runs on BSB and account number, so it's a growing option rather than the default yet.
BECS is the incumbent batch rail, and it still carries the bulk of payroll, supplier, and bill-payment volume. It's older and slower than the NPP, but it's entrenched, which matters for the next part.
The deadline that disappeared
For a while, the plan was to sunset BECS and migrate everything to the NPP by June 2030. That gave businesses a clear reason to move.
In December 2025, AusPayNet withdrew the 2030 decommissioning target entirely. BECS no longer has an end date. So the two rails now coexist indefinitely: the NPP for fast, data-rich payments, BECS for the entrenched batch volume it still carries. For a business paying into Australia, that means you can't assume BECS is going away, and you plan for both rather than betting on a migration that no longer has a deadline.
There's also PayTo, the mandate-based rail meant to succeed direct debit. It's promising, but the RBA's own assessment is that it has yet to demonstrate maturity, and it currently handles single transfers only. Worth watching, not yet worth building your Australian direct-debit strategy around.
What to do
If you're accepting from Australian consumers: lead with cards and digital wallets, and keep an eye on the RBA surcharging review since it may change the cost math.
If you're paying into Australia: use the NPP for fast, well-reconciled disbursements, consider PayID's ABN addressing to cut supplier-payment errors, and keep BECS in the plan because it isn't going anywhere. Don't build around a 2030 migration that's been called off.
Where Tazapay fits
A cross-border business shouldn't have to stand up an Australian entity to do any of this. Through Tazapay, you can accept Australian payments the way local buyers pay and pay into Australia over the local rails, without a local presence, so your Australian flows work both directions from wherever you're based.
POLi's closure left a gap, but not a crisis. Australia's payment story in 2026 is simple once you split it: cards and wallets to get paid, the NPP and BECS to pay out, PayID to address it more safely, and PayTo as one to watch.
Sources
[1] Reserve Bank of Australia. "Payments System Review." 2026.
[2] AusPayNet. "Australian Payments Network." 2026.
[3] Australian Payments Plus. "NPP and PayID." 2026.
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