kyle said:
Citibank's been "building" that scheduled Bpay facility for at least two years now.
Strange thing is that you can schedule payments from a Cit BANK account (not Visa) to third parties - but not to other Citi accounts or to BPay.
Citi in Australia is hamstrung by the momentum of being a huge international operation with a tiny appendage called Australia. Development of systems for our tiny market would be difficult for local Citi managers to get onto the IT development radar screen.
The nice thing, I suppose, is that Citi customers can do instant bank transfers to any other Citi customer around the world because Citi has just one huge IT platform.
The downside is that systems unique to Australia like BPay take forever to develop or enhance. Citi was the last of the non-regional banks in Australia to implement BPay and way last in allowing the labelling of transfer payments.
I guess even Citi had to eventually get labelling running - too many customers were probably complaining (by marching out the door) about being able to adequately identify their payments to eBay selllers.
There's occasional press speculation about whether Citi will eventually close its retail doors in Australia. Customer numbers have not reached critcal mass due to chicken/egg, quite likely. Customers won't come until the IT is state of the art - but it's not worth Citi committing IT development funds without a customer base to underwrite the commitment.