- NPPA alleges that Ripple breached Australia’s Trade Marks Act (1995) by using the PayID brand.
- NPPA allegedly launched the PayID brand in February 2018.
- PayID has more than 5 million registered users at the moment.
New Payments Platform Australia (NPPA), a group comprising all the significant banks in Australia is suing Ripple. A Report unveiled this news on August 26, noting that the consortium sued Ripple after it went against Australia’s Trade Marks Act (1995) and the Australian Consumer Law by using the organization’s brand and trademark dubbed PayID without authorization. Per the publication, NPPA filed this lawsuit in the past week in the Federal Court of Australia New South Wales Registry.
According to the report, NPPA asserted that it launched the PayID brand in Australia in February 2018 and that the launch was backed by a £1.8 million advertising campaign to make the platform mainstream. The firm added that it has been working on developing the brand since its launch.
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However, in June this year, NPPA’s CEO, Adrian Lovney discovered that Ripple had rolled out a similar PayID-branded service in Australia. Reportedly, this service was part of Ripple’s Open Payments Coalition (OPC), which has 40 global partners. Per the court document, three out of the 40 partner firms are based in Australia. These are FlashFX, BTC Markets, and Independent Reserve. However, Lovney claimed that there is evidence that proves the three exchanges falsely believed that there was an association between NPPA’s services and the ones that Ripple offers under the PayID trademark.
PayID is an important part of Australia’s payment industry
In the report, NPPA noted that it uses PayID to identify its addressing service and account proxies/aliases that are part of its inter-banking services. The platform allows customers to create unique identifiers that they can link to their banks through an email address, mobile number, or Australian Business Number. In so doing, the service allows them to make payments seamlessly.
Per NPPA, more than 90 big and small Australian banks and financial institutions have adopted this platform. The firm added that there are more than 5 million registered PayIDs and that the platform plays a significant role in Australia’s NPP, a payment platform created and operated by NPPA.
