He pūwaha pūtea, he pūwaha tangata
A gateway for resource, a gateway for people
As we head into spring, we’re looking back on what’s already been a huge year for Payments NZ – with progress and delivery across our Clearing Systems, API Centre and Payments Direction areas, and a busy calendar of events, industry and regulatory engagement.
It’s all part of delivering our purpose in an ever-changing payments and data landscape, as we aspire to world class payments for Aotearoa New Zealand.
Read our full update on the year so far below.
“We’re in the midst of significant and foundational change across our payments ecosystem with the pace of transformation only set to grow and increase. I’m proud of what the industry and our team has achieved so far this year, as we focus on our role as kaitiaki for the payments system, delivering on our strategic pillars to help lead the industry into the future. The stage is set for us to finish the year strong and look ahead with confidence into 2026.” - Steve Wiggins
Clearing Systems
We’re seeing solid progress towards a key ISO20022 implementation deadline in November this year, where all HVCS participants must be able to send and receive MX payment messages. This change provides key capabilities that will help deliver a faster and lower cost payment network for customers, leveraging richer and more structured data.
Our switching working group has delivered strong results since the start of this year, working to increase public awareness and improve the efficiency of the process. This includes the launch of a consumer-facing website, www.readytoswitch.nz, in June as well as improved reporting on switching activity. Further work is underway to promote the service on an industry basis and to address known pain points, improving the customer experience and allowing the process to be scaled up as required.
We reconfirmed our 30 April 2026 sunset date for PCI 4.x EFTPOS devices earlier this year, and have been working with industry to communicate and explain the importance of this and other life cycle dates. We’ll continue to support industry over the coming year to ensure merchants are ready for the sunset date. A separate review of our life cycle process is also underway.
In April 2025, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Te Pūtea Matua (RBNZ) published new access criteria for operating an ESAS account, which includes non-bank deposit takers, payment service providers and overseas deposit takers. Payments NZ has worked closely with the RBNZ to align our respective application and testing requirements, and to provide transparency for potential applicants on what is required to become a direct settlement participant across the three Clearing Systems.
Payments Direction
We had a great response to our public consultation on payments for the next generation earlier this year, receiving a wide range of views from the payments industry and communities across Aotearoa.
The feedback identified six overarching themes that will inform our work on next generation payments moving forward:
- Consolidated strategic roadmap: Delivering new payments capability that creates value for consumers and businesses in a clear and sequenced manner.
- Managed delivery: Ensuring investment in future payments infrastructure represents value for the ecosystem and considers competing priorities with delivery of other industry and regulatory initiatives.
- Governance: Ensuring equitable and transparent governance for future payments infrastructure.
- Infrastructure investment: Support for the development of right-sized utility infrastructure to support both current and future needs of the ecosystem.
- Data strategy: Meeting customer and regulatory needs while considering the data impacts and requirements of future payments infrastructure.
- Inclusivity: Ensuring all New Zealanders can participate in and benefit from future payments infrastructure.
Consultation responses also indicated support for further work to define the strategic pre-conditions for the foundational pillars (data strategy, scheme framework, utility infrastructure) and digital identity, and to develop recommendations for subsequent actions.
You can find more detail and read the responses we have received permission to publish here.
Shortly, we’ll be releasing a report summarising all consultation feedback and our recommended next steps.
We’re working on an exploration of digital identity in payments as a key enabler for improved fraud and safety, better payments services and wider payments modernisation. This was an important deliverable from our industry workshops in partnership with Digital Identity New Zealand (DINZ) in 2024. We’ll be sharing further insights and next steps for digital identity in payments in coming months.
Over the rest of 2025 we plan to focus on exploring the key foundational elements that will further inform how we can work to modernise the payments system in Aotearoa. Our proposed work includes completing a consolidated strategic roadmap, focussing on both the potential improvements we can make in the shorter term by leveraging existing capabilities, and on considering what investigations and activities we need to lean into (including next generation capabilities) as we prepare for the future. We will be running a series of workshops to progress this work with our Participants and Members over the next few months.
We’re also finalising our latest Environmental Scan for release, providing a global and local overview of trends shaping the payments ecosystem in Aotearoa. Look out for the full report and insights to be shared through our channels soon.
API Centre
We celebrated six years of collective mahi for industry-led open banking at The Hub | Pulse in Tāmaki Makaurau in June – a great opportunity to look back at what the ecosystem has achieved so far, with groundwork laid in previous years now delivering tangible results.
At this event we announced a significant milestone with the publication of Ngā Tohu Ārahi, our API Centre Data Handling Guidelines, which offer a framework for the ethical handling of customer data, grounded in the principles of Māori data sovereignty and Māori data governance.
The guidelines were developed in partnership with Māori data science experts at Nicholson Consulting, and refined through workshops, hui, qualitative interviews, working group sessions and webinars with our API Centre Standards Users and Māori organisations and leaders. They will continue to evolve as we align and integrate them into our mahi.
The end of May also marked the third milestone date in our Minimum Open Banking Implementation Plan, with the four largest banks in Aotearoa now ready to partner using our updated v2.3 Payment Initiation standard. This unlocks important new functionality for open banking fintechs and paytechs, including enduring payment consent. A further milestone for the v2.3 Account Information standard will follow in November this year.
Alongside our functional standards, we recently introduced new customer experience guidelines, demonstrating safer customer journeys and how intermediary experiences could look. We’ll be also delivering a performance standard later this year, which will provide common settings for performance and availability and guidelines for handling service outages.
During August we’ve also surveyed open banking stakeholders to help inform our future standards roadmap, including API providers, third parties and community contributors as well as government agencies, corporates and community organisations. This will help us get a comprehensive picture of gaps to fill and opportunities to address in our standards development to grow open banking into the future.
Our partnering project, which began following authorisation from the Commerce Commission in 2024, has ticked over its first year. We have now worked with 19 of our Standards User organisations in the Partnering Working Group to develop a partnering framework, and have made good progress. We will be able to share more developments in this space in the coming months.
In the meantime, the API Centre continues to grow, with eight new Third Parties joining us this year. This puts us on a great footing to continue our industry momentum, and enable more innovative fintech businesses to deliver secure, convenient, and powerful open banking services to more New Zealanders.
Tō Mātou Haerenga
The release of Ngā Tohu Ārahi, the API’s Centre Data Handling Guidelines, in June was an important milestone in our exploration of Māori data sovereignty and data governance. This mahi is an ongoing priority within our te ao Māori journey at Payments NZ – guided by our Tō Mātou Haerenga strategy, which outlines our commitment in ensuring representation and rangatiratanga of Māori in the payments network.
We have continued to lay the foundations for this over the first half of 2025, building cultural competency and understanding across our organisation in line with our strategic goals and outcomes for this phase of our journey.
He reo tuku iho. He reo ora. He reo Māori mō āpōpō
An inherited language. A living language. A language for our future.
This week (14-20 September) marks the fiftieth Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori, Māori Language Week. We’re celebrating through team workshops and drop-in events for our staff, and lifting the presence of te reo through our external channels – raising the bar for other activities over the coming year.
Ka nui te mihi ki Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, me te tini o ngā ringa raupā kua whawhai mō te whakarauoratanga o te reo rangatira. We acknowledge Te Taura Whiri and all those who have fought with determination for the survival and revival of our indigenous language.
We have also continued our sponsorship of Ngā Matihiko Innovation Awards, recognising Māori in digitech in May. A big ngā mihi again to Te Hapori Matihiko for their excellent work in supporting tīpu (emerging) and tōtara (esteemed) Māori talent working in the digital space. Ka mau te wehi!
Regulatory landscape
The passing of the Customer and Product Data Act 2025 (“the Act”) in late March, along with the announcement of banking as the first sector designated under the Act, was a significant moment for open banking in Aotearoa and for our API Centre. We’ve been progressing discussions with MBIE to better understand the implementation timeline and processes for the Act, and the role the API Centre will continue to play in the open banking ecosystem.
Competition has been a key focus for regulators in 2025, with the Commerce Commission’s market study into personal banking last year being followed by a Parliamentary Select Committee inquiry into banking competition. Our Chief Executive Steve Wiggins and senior leaders appeared before the inquiry in February to highlight our role in supporting choice and competition for New Zealanders. We continue to work closely with government, regulators and the wider industry to support the development of a safe, efficient, innovative, interoperable and open payments system, one that enables participation by new entrants and delivers long-term benefits to consumers and businesses.
We submitted a response in June to the Council of Financial Regulators’ (CoFR) Issues Paper on access to basic transaction accounts in Aotearoa. We support CoFR’s objective of promoting financial inclusion and reducing barriers to access, and our submission acknowledged the critical role that basic transaction accounts play in helping people participate fully in economic life, while also highlight some of the system-wide considerations needed to support this initiative effectively.
Last month the RBNZ released a proposal to designate the High Value Clearing System (HVCS) under the Financial Market Infrastructures Act 2021. Consultation on the proposal will run until 30 September 2025. We have longstanding concerns, shared in other submissions to the RBNZ over the last decade, about designating a rule set under the FMI Act – particularly as we do not operate any infrastructure (with settlement taking place in the RBNZ’s Exchange Settlement Account System, which is a designated settlement system). We’re reviewing the latest proposal and will make a submission to the RBNZ with further detail.
All of our past submissions to regulators are available on our website.
Industry engagement and connections
We began a busy year for events with The Link in March, celebrating International Women’s Day and this year’s theme of #AccelerateAction. We heard from sports trailblazers Jo Caird and Georgie (Paula George), co-owners of the BNZ Kāhu professional women’s basketball team, who shared their inspiring stories and their efforts in accelerating action for wāhine and advancing gender equality.
At the end of March, we had the pleasure of welcoming thought leaders David Birch and Victoria Richardson to Auckland for a series of workshops with the Payments NZ team and our members. Their sessions provided valuable international insights allowing us to test local thinking against global trends and to strengthen our collective understanding of where payments are heading.
The Strategic Forum is our long-running forum we hold several times a year for our Participants and Members – always a great opportunity to network and foster an environment of innovation by looking out to the future and better understanding trends and signals. Our first Forum for the year was held in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington in March, featuring guest speaker Professor Stephen Cummings from Victoria University of Wellington talking about new trends in strategy development processes.
It was Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s turn to host The Forum in August, with a great turnout for our theme of ‘Global Horizons’. We welcomed trade and geopolitics expert Stephen Jacobi, Tourism New Zealand’s Bjoern Spreitzer, and NZIER’s Christina Leung, who shared insights on the changing geopolitical climate and its implications for Aotearoa, along with insights on the Aotearoa tourism market. We also welcomed Benjamin Lee, interim Director of Nexus Global Payments (NGP), the newly established legal entity responsible for operating the Nexus payment scheme – a multilateral platform connecting domestic fast payment systems for cross-border use.
As well as our own events, we connected with the wider industry and communities across Aotearoa through Creative HQ’s Fintech Festival in Wellington, Fintech NZ’s Hui Taumata, and the Open Banking Summit in Auckland.
We also took part in Techweek25 this year with an API Centre tech deep dive, presented by our own Nigel Somerfield – exploring our API Standards and how they enable world-class security, using tech demos run within our free-to-access API Sandbox, powered by Glueware. API Centre Manager Phil Cass set the scene with a look at current work and upcoming developments in open banking.
Further afield, we had strong representation at events internationally, including NACHA’s Faster Smarter Payments Conference in New Orleans, the Payments Canada Summit in Toronto, the Digital Money Summit in London, Australian Payments Plus’s Beyond Tomorrow 2025, and the Australia CPD Summit.
We were also thrilled to be awarded Best PayTech Overhaul at the 2025 PayTech Awards in London – recognising industry efforts behind the move our SBI retail payments system to 7-day payments in May 2023, supporting an always-on economy in Aotearoa and settling over $200 million to merchants every weekend in its first year. We were also proud finalists in two other categories - PayTech Leadership – Visionary CEO (Steve Wiggins), and Top Payments Innovation in Banking (API Centre – open banking).
15 years of Payments NZ
We’ll be celebrating Payments NZ’s 15th birthday as an organisation later this year, with a special The Hub event to cap off 2025 – look out for further news on this celebration of everything we’ve achieved together as an industry.
The Point 2026
Planning is already underway for The Point 2026, the payment industry’s flagship biennial conference. This will be held at the much-anticipated New Zealand International Convention Centre (NZICC), in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.
Mark off the last week of November 2026 in your calendars now – and sign up to our mailing list to get the latest updates as conference details are confirmed.