PayTo CX Guidelines – Shaping the Future of Australia’s Payments Experience

Australian Payments Plus (AP+) comprises the nation’s leading payment providers – BPAY Group, eftpos and NPP Australia. Its latest innovation, PayTo, offers fast, secure payments that move funds between bank accounts instantly. Customers can use PayTo in everyday transactions such as utility bills, flight bookings, subscriptions and digital wallet top-ups. As a new solution in early stages of market penetration, PayTo’s success hinges on adoption by merchants and billers. Key to adoption is ensuring a cohesive and consistent user experience. For customers, inconsistent experiences across merchants can quickly discourage usage. For merchants, friction or confusion in implementing PayTo can prevent adoption.

Thoughtworks led the creation of the CX guidelines utilising their hands-on “design in delivery” tech expertise. This made the design journey smoother – addressing technical feasibility uncertainties with merchants during the design phase – and played a pivotal role in helping AP+ navigate the complex process of launching a universal CX standard. Thoughtworks worked closely with AP+ through three critical stages: 1) knowledge acquisition; 2) design & ideation; and 3) guideline creation & refinement. More that just a set of standards, the guidelines are available both as a illustrated written guide, and as tech design templates ready for designers and developers to use immediately.

In two months, AP+ launched PayTo’s CX guidelines for merchants and billers, achieving adoption with 110+ financial institutions and 12.7 million registered users. The comprehensive straightforward guide offers clarity on what to build and how to present PayTo, ensuring consistency and instilling confidence in implementation. In addition to supporting PayTo’s go-to-market strategy and broad-based adoption, these guidelines established new industry standards for AP+’s newest payment experience. These guidelines serve a wide range of merchants, and offer high-fidelity prototypes that cover most prevalent use cases, encouraging widespread adoption. They simplify the CX journey, eliminating uncertainties and providing insights into solution rationale.

More than just designing for journeys within a single product or brand, PayTo’s CX guidelines are designed for use across whole industries, leading to much greater scope and complexity. Through the experience, users transition between multiple different environments - from merchants’ channels, into the customer’s banking app, and back to the merchant. These guidelines provide patterns, conventions, guidance and prototypes to help with every step of different common journeys across a range of different industries. Generative AI was used to create distinctly Australian mock brands to demonstrate journeys within different industry contexts that could be indicative without being generic. Designed to ”serve as the start of a discussion about great customer experience, not the end of it,” the illustrated, written guidelines document is useful to business, product owners, designers and developers. Across almost 70 pages, it outlines key recommendations with indicative user interface designs, and with the intended business and customer value highlighted alongside. More than just delivering a PDF of design recommendations however, the guidelines are accompanied by dozens of interface design prototypes, full user flows, and component libraries via collaborative design tool Figma. This makes the guidelines easier for tech design and delivery teams to quickly and consistently implement.