PayCore Partners today published a new thought leadership paper examining the Australian payments landscape over the past decade.
The paper, From Legacy Rails to Real-Time: Payments Then and Now, is authored by Doug Kilburn (pictured), a payments and technology transformation leader with more than 25 years of experience working across retail banking, payments infrastructure, and capital markets in the UK, US, and Australia.
The paper is anchored in a 2017 GreySpark Partners research report — co-authored by Doug Kilburn — which forecast the disruption of Australia’s bank-dominated payments infrastructure by real-time rails, open APIs, platform modernisation, and fintech entrants. Reading that original analysis against what has since unfolded provided the catalyst for the new paper.
“A lot of what we wrote in 2017 was largely right,” said Doug Kilburn. “What struck me wasn’t what we got right. It was how much harder the delivery turned out to be than any of us anticipated. The technology was rarely the hard part. The real work sat in governance, sequencing, and keeping organisations moving safely through years of change in environments where failure simply wasn’t an option.”
The paper covers four key areas: what the industry anticipated correctly; where delivery complexity was consistently underestimated; seven leadership principles drawn from large-scale program experience; and what the next decade of payments delivery will demand from organisations and their leaders, including a direct examination of what AI and automation will and will not change.
Key observations from the paper include:
- Platform modernisation and real-time infrastructure moved from concept to reality, but the organisational effort required was significantly greater than most strategies anticipated.
- ISO 20022 adoption behaved less like a technical upgrade and more like an operating model change.
- Governance, when designed well, accelerates delivery rather than slowing it down.
- AI and automation will compress delivery timelines and change how programs are resourced and executed — but they will not remove the need for clear accountability, sound sequencing, and execution discipline. Speed without governance is faster failure.
The paper is available now at paycorepartners.io.
