What PayID actually is
PayID is Australia's system for linking a simple identifier — a phone number or an email address — to a bank account, so people can send you money without needing your BSB and account number at all. Instead of asking a friend to dig up their bank details and hoping you've typed them correctly, you just need something they already know off the top of their head: their number or their email.
It sits on top of Australia's real-time payments infrastructure, which is what makes it fast — transfers made to a PayID typically land in seconds rather than the hours or next business day a traditional transfer can take. It's supported across the major Australian banks, and once someone has registered a PayID with their bank, it works the same way no matter which app or bank you're sending from.
Why it's better for paying friends back
A standard bank transfer needs three things to go right: you need the other person's BSB, their account number, and you need to type both correctly. For a business you pay regularly, that's a one-time cost. For a friend you're reimbursing for last night's dinner, it's friction you have to redo every time — unless you've saved their details, which most people haven't for someone they only owe money to occasionally.
PayID skips all of that. If you already have someone's number or email saved as a contact, you effectively already have what you need to pay them. There's no account number to mistype, no waiting for a transfer to clear before the money actually shows up, and no need to ask "what's your BSB again?" mid-conversation.
Setting one up
Registering a PayID is generally done through your existing bank's own app — most of the major Australian banks support it, and the process is usually just linking a phone number or email address to one of your existing accounts. It's a one-time setup: once it's registered, anyone sending money to that phone number or email routes straight to the linked account, no matter which bank they're sending from.
It's also worth knowing PayID isn't tied to a single bank or app — it's a shared system across participating banks, so a PayID registered with one bank works exactly the same way as one registered with another. That's part of what makes it useful as a general-purpose way to get paid, rather than something that only works if both people happen to use the same banking app.
How Split Bill uses it
This is exactly why LOCKEDIN Split Bill is built around PayID rather than treating repayment as an afterthought. Once a bill is split and everyone can see what they owe, getting paid back is the last step — and it should be the easiest one, not the part that stalls for a week. With a PayID on hand, whoever's owed money can be paid instantly, without either person needing to dig through banking apps for account details.
It's worth being clear about what this is and isn't: PayID is a payment addressing system, not a separate payment app. Split Bill uses it to make the "who do I pay, and how" question trivial once the maths is done — the actual transfer still happens through your everyday banking app, just without the usual friction of finding someone's account details first.
Try LOCKEDIN Split Bill
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The bottom line
Working out who owes what is only half the problem — actually getting paid is the other half, and it's usually the slower one. PayID closes that gap by turning "getting paid back" into a phone number or email instead of a form full of bank details, which is exactly why it's at the core of how Split Bill works.