New Zealand’s Blueprint for Real-Time Banking: Collaboration Over Code

By Simon Lyons, CSO of obconnect

When instant payments collapsed the old “buffer of days” into seconds, the industry lost a natural defence against fraud and misdirection. Many markets responded with point solutions: partial name checks here, central files there, vendor-led widgets everywhere. New Zealand chose a different path and, in doing so, set out a blueprint for how banking infrastructure should be built in a real-time world: collaboratively, with shared rules, utilities, and incentives. If you’re looking for the next model to follow, start there. And yes, the story has a protagonist. 

Everyone needs a Janet.

From mandate to momentum

Confirmation of Payee (CoP) is, at heart, name-checking before money moves. The UK popularised the concept in 2019, mandating its biggest banks to build and connect rapidly. It worked, coverage grew, and fraud fell, but success brought rigidity: hundreds of banks, many vendors, and a change-management challenge each time the rulebook evolved.

New Zealand studied that experience and asked a more fundamental question: how do we harvest the lessons without inheriting the constraints? Led by Get Verified CEO Duncan Robertson and a small team, including industry veteran and RegTech convenor Janet Chenery, the New Zealand Banking Association, and member banks, mapped best practices globally. Then they wrote a localised rulebook that was tight on standards and liability, and pragmatic on technology. Crucially, they established Get Verified, a bank-owned central utility to host common capabilities and orchestrate trust. That meant banks did not have to procure and customise heavyweight tech to join; they could connect to a shared platform with consistent SLAs, governance, and test environments.

Standards first, technology second

This inversion is the New Zealand superpower. Instead of starting with code and retrofitting governance, the team started with the risk framework: what data is exchanged, by whom, under which liabilities, and with what evidence trails. New Zealand also made deliberate design choices, for example not returning the “close match” account name in customer-facing journeys, which both simplified delivery and reduced privacy risk. With the rules crisp, the technology could be relatively straightforward: APIs at the banks, standardised software centrally, no personal data sitting at rest in a big shared vault, and no residual data bound up inside payments themselves.

The results speak a language bankers understand: outcomes. ANZ reported a 30% reduction in payment errors after CoP, and industry figures point to a 17% drop in Ombudsman complaints. Those are rare, high-signal statistics in a domain that too often measures success by project plans rather than customer harm avoided.

A collaborative blueprint, not a single product

The real lesson is bigger than CoP. Working with obbonnect brought not only technology but a partnership providing valuable insights into lessons learned by those who went before. By mutualising the trust framework (identity, access, rules, liability), New Zealand took a future outcome-based approach. They created an ecosystem for bank-to-bank APIs that can deliver many products over time: confirmation of payee today, and confirm-and-protect flows like “verification of payer,” cross-bank statement exchange, richer credit assessments, or sector-specific attestations such as KYB, ESG, or affordability checks. Once the rails are in place, the marginal cost of the next product falls dramatically because the governance burden —the hard part —has already been cleared.

That stands in contrast to one-off builds, where each bank procures its own flavour of technology, each vendor ships a subtly different interface, and national coverage becomes a jigsaw you only complete years later. Central utilities do not eliminate competition; they move it up the stack to customer experience, analytics, and value-added services, while preserving the safety and interoperability primitives.

Interoperability: from ambition to architecture

Because New Zealand has adopted best practices and aligned closely with UK standards at the protocol layer, cross-border experiments are already feasible. Early tests that embed CoP in international payment flows have proven technically sound; what remains is governance, which is always slower than code but unavoidable if you want reliability at scale. A reasonable horizon is within 2027, when instant pre-payment checks on foreign payouts should be routine for corporates that manage payables across markets. When that arrives, finance teams will stop treating “name mismatch risk” as the cost of doing business and will start treating it as a solvable network problem.

Why everyone needs a Janet

Infrastructure shifts do not succeed because the best code wins; they succeed because someone bridges the cultures of regulators, banks, vendors, and the public, and keeps the coalition moving when fatigue sets in. In New Zealand, that role had a name. Janet Chenery’s remit was intentionally broad: “find a solution,” and her method was deliberately open: agree on common principles, survey the world to find what good looks like, run showcases, hack on prototypes, adapting for fit for purpose outcomes and then codify what lasts into standards, not slideware. The project was more than an engineering sprint. It sought to bring all parties together to solve a common challenge, enabling the right operational, compliance and customer outcomes. 

That is the blueprint others should emulate: a convenor with credibility across stakeholder groups; rules that travel across products; utilities that lower barriers to adoption; and metrics that track harm reduced, not just APIs shipped. Do this, and your first win, CoP, becomes a platform for a decade of shared innovation.

New Zealand did not just implement Confirmation of Payee; it operationalised a collaborative way of working. For markets now contemplating their next steps on fraud, data sharing, and real-time risk, the message is clear. Build together. Standardise early. Mutualise the hard parts. 

And above all, find your Janet.