Grieving father petitions Parliament to force banks to block alcohol transactions on children's payment cards
Friday, 13 February 2026
Grieving father Ben Sims handed a petition to National minister Chris Penk on Thursday calling for a law change to force banks to stop allowing payments for alcohol to be made on children’s debit cards.
Sims’ 16-year-old son Silas was killed in July after crashing his car during an evening out with friends in which he bought alcohol in a bar and a bottle store in Warkworth with his ASB bank card.
It is illegal to sell alcohol to under 18s, and Silas’ parents were horrified to learn that despite purchases from alcohol vendors being flagged in bank systems as “restricted”, banks routinely processed transactions with those merchants on cards they had issued to children.
Sims met with all the major banks after Silas’ death in which he asked them to block alcohol transactions on children’s bank cards, but none signalled willingness to institute blocks, saying they were not easy to implement.
But Sims said alcohol vendors like bars and liquor stores were clearly flagged with “restricted” merchant codes in bank systems.
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Neither of the two financial regulators of banks - the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) and Reserve Bank of New Zealand - felt they had the power to compel banks to do what Sims argued they had a moral obligation to do.
That left him and his wife, Sarah, with no choice but to seek a political fix — meeting MPs from National, Labour, ACT and the Greens, and launching a petition to Parliament.
Sims said he’d been told his petition had little chance of succeeding, but at the very least it would trigger a select committee hearing that media could report on and require an official Government response
The process would raise awareness, Sims said. It may also put pressure on banks to stop facilitating alcohol sales to minors.
“I would say there’s a moral obligation on the banks,” he said.
Since Silas’ death, Sims had discoverd just how poorly New Zealand’s alcohol sales laws were enforced.
“If the alcohol laws were properly enforced, and properly prosecuted, we wouldn't be needing this at all because everybody would be ID’d,” he said.
“I still have this alternative story where Silas went out and went to the liquor store, and got asked for ID, didn’t have any any, so he went to the beach, and had a swim, and came home, which should have been what happened,” Sims said.
Jonathan Oram, ASB’s executive general manager of corporate banking, said: “Blocking specific transactions, such as alcohol or vape purchases, for minors would be very challenging for the industry to implement with the way card payment systems currently work, and with the data currently available.”
While banks received data about the type of business a transaction was made at - for example, bars, restaurants, supermarkets or dairies - banks had no visibility of individual products purchased.
“There are also limitations in the accuracy of the data we receive,” Oram said.
He also said payments did not flag as “restricted” at the time the transaction was made.
“This ‘business category’ information is one of a number of data points that is added retrospectively, if a customer clicks on a transaction, to help them better identify what the payment was for,” he said.
Sims did not accept this, pointing out banks did have certain spending blocks for things like gambling and alcohol on corporate credit cards.
In Australia, Westpac blocked under 18s’ credit and debit cards from being accepted in bottle shops, nightclubs, bars and vape shops.
Roger Beaumont, chief executive of the New Zealand Banking Association, the political lobbying group for banks, said it had met with Sims.
“We have discussed the technical issues that currently make blocking transactions on credit, debit, and Eftpos cards challenging,” Beaumont said.
However, he said: “The next generation of payments is currently being developed and it could be possible to build this kind of capability into the new systems, which may be a better way to go given the time and resources it would take to design and build fixes for the current payment systems.”
But, he said: “This would only be part of any solution to prevent underage people buying restricted products at certain retailers. It won’t get around minors using cash, fake IDs, and asking adults to make the purchases.”
The Reserve Bank told Sims its job was to secure the financial stability of the banking and payments system, not to oversee individual transactions.
It said retailer classification codes were “primarily designed for commercial and operational purposes, such as fee structures, rewards programmes, and corporate card controls, rather than as tools to regulate consumer purchasing behaviour”.
Sims said the reference to corporate card controls showed the Reserve Bank acknowledged banks could, and did, limit certain kinds of purchases on certain of the cards they issue, just not cards issued to children.
Under New Zealand’s Conduct of Financial Institutions (CoFI) laws banks have to treat customers “fairly” when providing services to them.
Sims said it was not fair to children to allow them to buy alcohol.
A spokesperson for the FMA, which polices the CoFI laws, said: “We have discussed it with banks and a range of other stakeholders including industry bodies and policymakers, and will continue to do so in the coming months.”
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