Tabitha Faulkner
Marketing Executive
finPOWER
On 22 April 2026, finPOWER hosted Powering Payments, Brought to you by finPOWER & Monoova, a full-day event focused on what modern payment infrastructure for lenders actually looks like in practice. The day was split into two parts: a morning session for the finPOWER team to get across Monoova’s capabilities in depth, and an afternoon customer session with a live demonstration of how the Monoova integration works inside Connect. Here’s what was covered.
Disbursements made via NPP move within seconds. For example, in the demo, a $1,750 SACC loan disbursement went from queued to pending to successful in real time. For lenders, this means borrowers receive funds immediately, and operational teams get instant confirmation rather than waiting on batch processing.
Connect includes a widget that automates PayID setup, pre-populating BSB, a unique client ID, and account name. This removes manual data entry and the reconciliation errors that come with it. Specifically, with proper PayID configuration, heavy suspense accounts effectively become unnecessary, payments are automatically matched and attributed to the correct loan account.
Pay2 is a fully digitalised alternative to traditional direct debit. Rather than collecting and storing physical DDR forms, a Pay2 agreement is initiated from within Connect, sent via Monoova’s API to the borrower’s bank, and the borrower approves it directly through their internet banking or mobile app.
Pay2 agreements include configurable parameters, including a maximum transaction amount (a useful safeguard against over-collection) and debit frequency. Agreements can be ad hoc,single-use, or persistent. Importantly, Pay2 carries no dishonour fees, a meaningful cost difference from traditional direct debit. The best practice recommendation from the session was to run Pay2 alongside direct debit as a fallback, so if a borrower cancels their Pay2 agreement, collections can continue uninterrupted.
Credit card details are never stored in the Connect database. Instead, card details are sent directly to Monoova, which returns a secure token that is stored against the client record. That token can then be linked to any loan account. This removes the security exposure associated with card data storage and simplifies PCI compliance obligations (subject to lender configuration and internal policies).
One of the practical highlights of the session was the contrast between NPP and legacy direct debit in terms of failure notification timing. By contrast, with NPP-based payments, insufficient funds or bank refusals are surfaced immediately, enabling lenders to act the same day, whether that’s capturing a partial payment, initiating an off-cycle payment, or triggering a different workflow. With traditional direct debit, that notification may not arrive for several business days.
Not yet live, but coming: Monoova confirmed that Confirmation of Payee, an industry-wide initiative rolling out across Australian banking, will be pushed through to Connect. The feature matches account ownership by verifying an account name against a BSB and account number, returning a full match, partial match, or no match. This is a meaningful tool for fraud identification and will be available to finPOWER customers once it goes live.
No. Monoova operates as a middle layer between your existing banking partner and your Connect environment, it doesn’t replace your bank. Your existing accounts remain in place. Monoova holds a float account for processing payments in and out, and most lenders run a daily sweep of funds back to their primary bank account at the end of each day.
You can run multiple methods simultaneously. In fact, the recommended approach from the session was specifically to use Pay2 alongside traditional direct debit, not to replace one with the other. If a borrower cancels their Pay2 agreement, collections fall back to direct debit automatically. NPP disbursements, PayID, and credit card tokenisation can all be active on the same system concurrently.
Pay2 works well for most recurring collection scenarios, but there are situations where traditional direct debit remains appropriate. Borrowers who bank with institutions that haven’t yet enabled Pay2 approval in their internet banking won’t be able to accept a Pay2 agreement, so direct debit is the practical fallback in those cases. There are also loan structures where the simplicity of the existing BECS infrastructure is sufficient, and the operational gains from Pay2 don’t justify the transition effort.
