NZ could be at the cusp of faster, friction-free payments, if we ditch the rulebook

Wednesday, 22 July 2026

It’s the easiest productivity win this country hasn’t yet made - ensuring the speed of our money is the same as the rest of much of the world, says Ben Hanna.

Ben Hanna is managing director of digital payment provider Stripe New Zealand.

OPINION: Any New Zealander who's recently spent time in London or Sydney knows the feeling. You split a dinner bill and the money lands before you've put your phone away. You pay a tradie and they receive their money instantly. Then you come home and wonder why it doesn't work like that here.

For over 600,000 New Zealand businesses, that gap isn't just an inconvenience. The speed of money matters. Getting paid quickly and reliably determines whether a business can hire the next employee, make the next investment, or survive the next slow month. Instead, businesses are running on payment infrastructure built in the 1990s, spending hours each week on reconciliation that modern systems handle automatically.

The government is reviewing how payments work in New Zealand and has opened a consultation on Payment Services Regulation. This provides an opportunity to fix this. The tech is ready, now it’s the rulebook holding us back. With real-time payment infrastructure, businesses could access cash on the day they earn it, change providers without friction, and spend less time on paperwork.

New Zealand was once a pioneer in digital payments. We were among the first economies to roll out Eftpos nationally in the 1980s and today are one of the most card-friendly markets in the world, with near-universal merchant acceptance and low transaction costs. New Zealand once led in this space, but other markets have leapfrogged us.

India's UPI processes 14 billion transactions a month in real time. Singapore's PayNow and the UK's Faster Payments have become foundational economic infrastructure. New Zealand and Canada are currently the only major economies without a live, real-time payment network.

Today, we remain reliant on the Bulk Electronic Clearing System (BECS), a batch-based infrastructure that does not support real-time settlement, meaning it can take days for payments to arrive. Meanwhile, Australia is committed to decommissioning BECS in the coming years, replacing it with the New Payments Platform that has been live since 2018.

The business case is clear. Xero, the accounting platform used by thousands of Kiwi businesses, found that when customers added a 'Pay Now' button to their invoices, those invoices were paid twice as fast. For a tradie waiting on payment before buying materials, or a retailer managing stock, that speed is the difference between planning confidently and running on anxiety.

Two further reforms would strengthen the framework. First, token portability would allow merchants to take their customers' stored payment credentials when they switch payment providers, removing the friction that currently locks businesses into a single provider. Second, opening access to New Zealand's Eftpos infrastructure to any licensed payment provider, rather than restricting it to incumbent operators, would give merchants more choice in the core technology they rely on every day. Alongside real-time payments, these reforms would reduce lock-in and open genuine competition on price and features.

The gains go beyond cash flow. A recent Stripe survey of Kiwi small and medium businesses found that users of online payment platforms saved nine hours a week - a full working day - and reported 26% higher annual sales, as well as improvements in the range of payment methods they could accept and overall customer experience.

The right regulatory framework would extend those gains to every business in New Zealand, not just those already using the most advanced tools.

At a macro level, the picture is just as compelling. Modelling by the UK-based Centre for Economic and Business Research estimates that a real-time payments network could lift New Zealand's GDP by 2.2%.

Real-time networks, token portability standards, open access frameworks - all of these exist, and are in place in many of the countries we trade with and compete against every day. The good news is New Zealand doesn’t need to invent anything new. The challenge is to update the rulebook and deliver a real-time payment network so it matches the ambition businesses are already demonstrating.