Quick answer: Australian Payments Plus (AP+), the operator of Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP), is a member of the Hedera Council. That is a governance relationship, not evidence that Hedera runs the NPP. A separate fraud-prevention project uses Swift, not Hedera. The first documented technical link came later, through the Reserve Bank’s Project Acacia pilot, where AP+ designed a Hedera-based token interchange service.
Updated 07/17/2026. By Jake Claver. Educational content, not investment advice.
Three separate facts about AP+ get blurred together online: its seat on the Hedera Council, its use of Swift for payee verification, and its role in a central bank tokenisation pilot. Each is real, and each means something specific. Read carelessly, they turn into a claim that Hedera powers Australia’s national payment rails. That is not what the sources say, so it is worth walking through them one at a time.
What actually happened with AP+ and Hedera
Hedera’s own announcement confirms Australian Payments Plus became a Hedera Council member, effective January 2024. AP+ was formed in 2022 by combining eftpos, BPAY Group, and NPP Australia, and eftpos was already a council member, so the membership carried over to the merged entity. May Lam, AP+’s Chief Information Officer, framed the interest plainly, saying distributed ledgers can give payments organisations increased transparency, security, and efficiency.
Council membership is a governance role. Members help steer the network’s direction and run nodes; they do not, by joining, migrate their own systems onto Hedera. So the accurate reading is that an organisation running critical national payments infrastructure chose a seat at Hedera’s governance table. That is worth tracking on its own terms.
What the New Payments Platform actually is
AP+ operates Australia’s New Payments Platform, the country’s real-time, account-to-account payments infrastructure launched in 2018. By AP+’s own figures it clears well over 165 million transactions a month, with more than 37 million registered PayIDs and roughly $7.8 billion in average daily payment value. It runs 24/7, including weekends and public holidays, through the Osko service.
The NPP is not a private venture floating free of the state. AP+ operates it under a formal memorandum of understanding with the Reserve Bank of Australia. That regulatory relationship is exactly why AP+’s technology choices draw attention: a change to the NPP is a change to plumbing the whole country depends on.
Where Swift fits, and where it does not
Separately, AP+ selected Swift to build Confirmation of Payee, as reported in early 2024. Confirmation of Payee is an anti-fraud check: before a payment goes through, it compares the payee name the sender typed against the name on the destination account, and warns the sender if they do not match. It is meant to cut down on misdirected payments and scams, and it sits within the NPP as a centralised account-matching service.
This is a Swift-built service. The sourcing establishes no technical connection between Confirmation of Payee and Hedera. Anyone stitching the council membership and the Swift contract into a single Hedera story is combining two facts that the documents keep apart.
The update: Project Acacia turned a governance tie into a tested link
When the original version of this post ran, there was no public source showing Hedera technology inside AP+’s systems. That has since changed, in a specific and bounded way. Under the Reserve Bank’s Project Acacia, a wholesale central bank digital currency pilot run with the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, AP+ designed and piloted a token interchange service. Hashgraph’s case study describes AP+, named as the operator of Australia’s domestic payments infrastructure and a Hedera Council member, building an interchange that performed atomic swaps between different tokenised forms of money, with a wholesale CBDC settling privately on HashSphere (a permissioned network built on Hedera) alongside a proxy token on the public Hedera network.
A related piece involved AUDD, described by Hedera as the first Australian dollar stablecoin issued natively on its network. Hedera’s case study states AUDD was selected for Project Acacia and worked alongside AP+ to demonstrate NPP-enabled stablecoin interoperability on Hedera. That is a real, documented link between AP+, the NPP, and Hedera technology. It is also a pilot, not production infrastructure: a research exercise settling small, capped test transactions, not the live NPP being re-platformed.
Reading these facts precisely
Put together honestly, the picture is a sequence, not a merger. AP+ holds a governance seat on the Hedera Council. It runs the NPP under RBA oversight. It uses Swift, not Hedera, for Confirmation of Payee. And in a central-bank research pilot, it tested Hedera-based settlement and interchange. None of that means the everyday payments Australians send today move over Hedera. Whether the pilot work ever becomes standing NPP infrastructure is a separate, still-open question that will need its own primary source before anyone can claim it.
Why this matters
Payments infrastructure changes slowly and deliberately because the cost of getting it wrong is national. That is why the distinction between a governance seat, a vendor contract, and a live pilot is not pedantry. Each carries a different level of commitment and a different timeline. For anyone watching Hedera’s traction in institutional settings, the accurate story, a member with a regulatory relationship to the central bank that has now co-run a tokenised-settlement pilot, is more useful than the inflated one, because it tells you what has actually been demonstrated and what still has to be proven. For broader regulatory framing on how authorities treat digital assets, the U.S. CFTC’s digital assets resources offer a comparison point outside Australia.
Common questions
Does Hedera run Australia’s New Payments Platform?
No. AP+ operates the NPP, and the everyday real-time payments Australians send do not settle on Hedera. AP+ is a member of the Hedera Council, which is a governance role, and it has tested Hedera-based settlement inside the Reserve Bank’s Project Acacia pilot, but that is research, not the live NPP.
What does being a Hedera Council member actually mean?
Council members help govern the Hedera network, including running nodes and steering its direction. Membership does not require or imply that the member has moved its own systems onto Hedera. AP+ inherited its seat when eftpos, an existing council member, merged into AP+ in 2022.
Is Confirmation of Payee built on Hedera?
No. AP+ selected Swift to build Confirmation of Payee, a fraud-prevention check that verifies a payee’s name matches their account before a payment completes. Public sourcing shows no technical link between that service and Hedera.
What was Project Acacia and how is AP+ involved?
Project Acacia was a wholesale central bank digital currency research pilot led by the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre. AP+ designed a token interchange service, and Hedera-based settlement (including the AUDD stablecoin and the HashSphere network) was tested among several platforms. It was a controlled pilot with capped transaction values.
So is Hedera going to power the NPP eventually?
That is unknown. The pilot work shows Hedera technology can interoperate with NPP-enabled flows, but no primary source says AP+ plans to move the production NPP onto Hedera. That would require a specific, future announcement, and it is worth waiting for one rather than assuming it.
This content is educational only. It is not tax, legal, or investment advice. Check primary sources and speak with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.
