Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock has called for a dual-track approach to Australia’s payments future, keeping cash robust and accessible while urgently upgrading the nation’s account-to-account (A2A) infrastructure.
Speaking at The Daily Telegraph’s Future Sydney: Bradfield Oration at the Sydney Opera House on Friday, October 24, 2025, Bullock said notes and coins still perform “a crucial role” in the resilience and inclusivity of the payments landscape.
Bullock emphasised that physical currency provides a vital back-up when digital channels fail, such as during outages or natural disasters, and remains essential for about 1.5 million Australians — predominantly older or vulnerable people with limited alternatives. Cash also continues to function as a store of value in periods of uncertainty.
“For these reasons, the RBA and the Government are committed to ensuring that cash continues to be a viable payment method for as long as Australians need or want to use it,” she said, adding that the underlying cash infrastructure “needs to be as efficient, sustainable and resilient as possible.”
Time to modernise
At the same time, Bullock warned that Australia’s core bank-to-bank transfer plumbing — the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS) — is “ageing and lacks features that are expected in a modern payments system.” BECS today facilitates payroll and government support flows worth hundreds of billions of dollars, yet parts of industry want to wind it down by the end of the decade.
An RBA review of that industry push concluded that several challenges must be solved to ensure an effective, orderly shift from BECS to alternative rails. The most fundamental, Bullock said, is agreeing on a public-interest vision for A2A payments — one that delivers safe, reliable, low-cost and easy-to-use transfers between bank accounts.
An A2A Roundtable bringing together industry, the RBA and Treasury is working toward a shared vision by year-end 2025 and a delivery plan by mid-2026. That roadmap will need to navigate trade-offs — including cost versus reliability, innovation versus legacy systems, and customer needs versus provider priorities.
“As with all payments systems, the interests of the various parties are not necessarily aligned,” Bullock said.
Beyond retail payments, the central bank also intends to modernise its own high-value settlement infrastructure — which processes about $300 billion a day — from 2026. The goal is to future-proof the backbone of wholesale payments while ensuring continuity and resilience.
Taken together, Bullock’s message was clear: Australia must modernise without marginalising. Cash will remain a cornerstone of resilience and inclusion, even as the country accelerates work on contemporary, feature-rich A2A rails that meet the demands of a digital economy.