2025 Environmental Scan Report

The 2025 Environmental Scan explores the global and interconnected trends shaping the future of payments in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This year’s report comes at a pivotal moment for the global payments ecosystem – an inflection point driven by rapid technological change, geopolitical instability, and evolving customer preferences. As our physical and digital worlds continue to merge, the overlaps and convergence we’ve seen in previous scans are now accelerating.

Succeeding beyond this inflection point will require collective momentum to modernise our payments systems and shared expertise across the industry to drive progress. Traditional and non-traditional financial services providers, regulators, and stakeholders all have a role to play in shaping the next era of payments.

Explore the six key trends from our 2025 Environmental Scan below or download the full report.

Emerging technologies and next generation payments

The convergence of technology and payment systems is reshaping transactions. Technology-driven disruption in commerce across payments and other domains is giving rise to non-human influences such as agentic AI, Internet of Things and embedded finance.

Digital payments platforms underpinning economies

Digital payment platforms boost economic activity by enabling faster, more secure transactions, leading to increased consumer spending and more business opportunities. These platforms foster innovation and growth, offering new products and services, which benefit consumers through better choices and lower costs.

The rise of tokenisation

Decentralised technologies continue to challenge traditional account-based products and services. Central banks, financial institutions and technology firms are in various stages of exploring and piloting new payment paradigms. Interest in the tokenisation of assets has increased significantly, with pilots in full swing around stablecoins and CBDCs.

Digital identity for consumers and businesses

Inefficiencies, identity theft, scams, and privacy breaches impose significant costs on the economy. Digital identity’s ability to identify parties quickly and securely, with active customer consent, minimises risk and opens opportunities for organisations and consumers to engage fairly and equitably.

Navigating financial services and payments regulation

Governments across the globe are striving to keep up with the digital payments evolution while promoting innovation and competition, increasing consumer protections, and ensuring a safe and resilient payments ecosystem.

From open banking to open ecosystems

The shift towards open ecosystems, beyond open banking, encourages innovation and enhances consumer control. This transition allows businesses and consumers to combine their data, creating more interconnected choices and targeted opportunities.

About our Environmental Scans

As part of our work with the payments industry, we conduct full Environmental Scans on a regular basis. These reports take an international view of trends impacting our payments ecosystem – helping inform our response as an industry to future opportunities and challenges.

Environmental Scans form just part of the work of our Payments Direction programme, which provides strategic leadership on industry initiatives to shape the future of payments in Aotearoa.