Something crossed a line in New Zealand’s payment system in June, and almost nobody outside the industry noticed. For the first time, New Zealanders moved more than $100 million in a single month by paying straight from their bank accounts instead of reaching for a card. The exact figure was $114.539 million, up 24 per cent on May, and it arrived with matching jumps in the number of payments made and the number of people making them.
The data comes from Payments NZ, which since late last year has published a monthly tally of open banking activity reported by the banks themselves. Its June update records 362,869 open banking payments completed during the month, up 19 per cent on May’s 304,215, and 198,775 unique customers who authorised at least one payment, up 18 per cent. Phil Cass, who manages the API Centre at Payments NZ, wrote that the ecosystem data showed open banking in New Zealand continuing to gain momentum.
One caveat belongs at the top, before anyone extrapolates a curve. June was the first month Kiwibank reported its open banking activity, so part of that 24 per cent lift is a wider net rather than new behaviour. The upside is that all five of the country’s largest banks are now in the figures, which makes June the first genuinely complete month of data and a far better baseline than a growth rate.
It is also worth putting $114 million alongside the system it is meant to compete with. In the same month, Stats NZ recorded $9.1 billion of electronic card spending across 166 million transactions. Open banking payments were about 1.3 per cent of that value, and roughly two tenths of one per cent of the transaction count. Cards have not been troubled yet.
The more revealing number is one nobody publishes, and it takes about ten seconds with a calculator. Divide June’s value by June’s count and the average open banking payment was around $316. The average card transaction that month was $55. That gap tells you what is actually happening. Account to account payments in New Zealand are not being used to buy a $40 pair of shoes at nine at night. They are being used for invoices, rent, transfers, account top ups and the sort of larger, considered payment where somebody is happy to open their banking app and approve it. Pay by bank has arrived in New Zealand’s finances. It has not really arrived in New Zealand’s checkouts.
That gap matters if you sell online, because every economic signal points the same way. The Commerce Commission’s new interchange caps took effect on 1 December 2025 and are estimated to save New Zealand businesses about $100 million a year, with caps on foreign issued cards following on 1 May 2026. Useful, but interchange is only one slice of what a merchant pays, and card not present transactions remain the dearer end of the market. Against that, BlinkPay publishes a rate of 0.59 per cent per transaction on its base plan and 0.49 per cent on the tier above, alongside a monthly platform fee. Its own comparison page cites a standard domestic card rate of 2.65 per cent plus 30 cents. Even allowing for the monthly fee, the difference at volume is not marginal.
The other half of the cost story stalled in Parliament. The bill to ban most in store card surcharges passed its first reading and then ran out of road. RNZ reported in March that ACT leader David Seymour called it “dead”, Retail NZ chief executive Carolyn Young said it was “actually not going to proceed anywhere in this term”, and Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Scott Simpson said “no further decisions have been made on the ban on surcharges”. Online surcharging was never inside the ban’s scope in any case. For anyone selling on a website, the cost of accepting a card is a commercial problem to solve, not one legislation is about to solve for them.
Plenty of companies now think there is money in solving it. Open banking became a regulated regime on 1 December 2025 under the Customer and Product Data Act, which requires any business accessing bank data or initiating payments to be accredited by MBIE. When I checked the public register, updated 22 July, it listed 14 accredited requestors in banking. Eight of those 14 were accredited after 12 May this year, and six of them since 12 June. The supply side is filling up considerably faster than the demand side.
Which brings me to the part that gets skipped in most coverage. Adding pay by bank to a website is not simply choosing a cheaper rate. If you run on Shopify, Shopify’s own pricing adds a fee of 2 per cent on Basic, 1 per cent on Grow and 0.6 per cent on Advanced when you use a third party payment provider instead of Shopify Payments. Stack a 2 per cent platform fee on top of a 0.59 per cent gateway fee and the cheap payment method is no longer cheap. That single line of Shopify’s pricing page explains more about slow merchant adoption in New Zealand than any consumer survey will. On WooCommerce, a headless build or anything custom, no such penalty exists, and the maths works as advertised.
The checkout itself also behaves differently. The customer is handed off to their banking app to approve the payment and then handed back, which means your flow has to survive an app switch on a phone and return cleanly. Confirmation arrives from a webhook rather than an instant card authorisation, so order status logic has to handle a payment that is pending for a few seconds. There are no chargebacks, which merchants like, but refunds then become entirely yours to initiate rather than a dispute somebody else adjudicates. An overseas visitor with a foreign card cannot use it at all. None of this is difficult, but it is work, and it should be scoped as work rather than treated as a plugin you switch on.
So the honest advice for most New Zealand businesses is to be selective rather than either enthusiastic or dismissive. If you invoice, take deposits, run recurring payments, accept donations or sell business to business at high value, pay by bank is worth pricing this year, and the June data suggests your customers are already comfortable with it. If your average order is $45 and half your traffic is guest checkout or offshore, cards will stay your primary rail for some time yet and the sensible move is to keep watching.
The direction of travel is not in doubt. Kiwibank’s remaining open banking services are due by 1 December 2026, and the Commerce Commission has made its position plain, with Commissioner Bryan Chapple writing in an open letter on 5 March that “our interest is in seeing widespread adoption of open banking”. Electricity is queued as the second designated sector, which we covered in June. What changed last month is that the payments side stopped being a pilot and started being a market, still worth about a hundredth of the card system but growing from a base that is now measured properly. The businesses that benefit first will be the ones that know which of their payments are the $316 kind.
Roger McSaveney is General Manager of Forge Creative, an Auckland web design and development agency.
Would you pay a New Zealand business straight from your bank account instead of using a card, and what would make you trust it. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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