Commonwealth Bank Unveils PaidIt to Automate Complex Payouts Ahead of Australia’s Cheque Phase-Out

Commonwealth Bank has launched PaidIt, a digital platform designed to automate complex payouts such as settlements, remediation, and refunds. For fintech professionals, this represents a critical infrastructure shift as Australia mandates the phase-out of cheques by 2028, forcing institutions to digitise payments even when recipient data is incomplete or outdated.

What was announced

PaidIt is an end-to-end payout management platform that addresses the operational burden of distributing funds when an organisation lacks current banking details for a recipient. The platform integrates recipient verification, communication workflows, and payment delivery into a single interface. At its core is a recipient matching engine that performs identity and account checks to determine if a payment can be processed automatically or requires manual intervention.

The system leverages Australia’s modern financial infrastructure, including the New Payments Platform (NPP), PayID, and ConnectID. By utilizing these digital identity and real-time payment rails, PaidIt has achieved a median processing time of less than two minutes from the moment a recipient starts a claim to the funds arriving in their account. This speed contrasts sharply with traditional manual processes that often rely on postal addresses and can take weeks or months to resolve.

Currently, PaidIt is being utilised internally by Commonwealth Bank for specific cases involving missing payment details. The bank intends to roll out the service to additional business units and make it available to Corporate and Institutional Banking clients in the coming months. The launch targets a significant market inefficiency; ASIC currently holds approximately $2.7 billion in unclaimed money, a figure that does not include additional funds held by state and territory governments.

"As Australia moves towards a cheque-free future, organisations have an opportunity to rethink how they manage complex payouts – particularly in situations where cheques have traditionally provided a practical fallback."

Regis Petit, Executive General Manager, Institutional Transaction Banking, Commonwealth Bank.

The companies involved

Commonwealth Bank (CBA) is Australia’s largest retail bank and a dominant force in the domestic financial services sector. The development of PaidIt was handled by x15ventures, which serves as the bank’s dedicated venture scaling arm. Launched to build, buy, and invest in startups that provide adjacent services to CBA’s core banking products, x15ventures operates as a bridge between the bank’s institutional scale and the agility of the fintech ecosystem.

The platform relies on the New Payments Platform (NPP), Australia’s national infrastructure for real-time, data-rich payments. This infrastructure is supported by PayID, which allows users to link easy-to-remember identifiers like phone numbers or email addresses to their bank accounts, and ConnectID, a digital identity exchange. The involvement of ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) highlights the regulatory backdrop of the project, as the commission manages the vast sums of unclaimed money that PaidIt aims to reduce through better recipient matching and faster delivery.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has previously tracked the evolution of the Australian payments landscape, particularly the transition toward real-time infrastructure. In our report Australian Corporates Accelerate Shift to Real-Time Payments as Treasury Transformation Takes Center Stage, we highlighted how domestic firms are increasingly prioritising NPP-based solutions to modernise their treasury functions. This broader trend toward real-time settlement provides the necessary foundation for specific applications like PaidIt to function effectively at scale.

What this means

The launch of PaidIt places immediate pressure on legacy payment providers and manual remediation firms that have long profited from the inefficiencies of the cheque system. By automating the "search and verify" phase of a payout, Commonwealth Bank is effectively weaponising its access to national identity rails to lower the cost of compliance and customer service. The 2028 cheque deadline is no longer a distant regulatory hurdle; it is now a commercial catalyst. The industry must now consider whether a "median two-minute" payout becomes the new standard for consumer expectations, potentially making any institution still relying on manual verification or postal outreach appear obsolete. The move also signals that the NPP is moving beyond simple P2P transfers into sophisticated, high-stakes corporate and institutional workflows.