Some partnerships are engineered. The best ones tend to grow.
A few years ago now, we started working with the team at Raidiam. This was well before our New Zealand chapter. Raidiam were making their first moves into South America, and obconnect happened to be able to assist them in a few areas. We lent a hand. It worked.
That early, practical bit of collaboration matured into something far bigger – the two of us delivering the nationwide Confirmation of Payee solution for the New Zealand Bankers Association. When you build a country-scale trust system together, you learn whether a partnership is real. Ours is.
One relationship leads to another
From that initial engagement, obconnect became involved with PayPoint – first as an investor in our business, and latterly as our parent group. We now proudly sit as part of the PayPoint family. It’s a reminder that you rarely know where a single good relationship will lead. You simply do the work well, with people you trust, and let it compound.
Last year, an opportunity came about in the energy sector – specifically around consent and data sharing, working in the orbit of OFGEM and the bodies shaping how household energy data should move. It’s a problem we know intimately, because it’s the same problem we’ve spent years solving in banking: how do you let data flow between parties at scale, while the consumer stays firmly in control of who sees what, and why?
A potentially seismic moment
Now, Raidiam and PayPoint are working together on one of the most exciting data regimes on the planet.
RECCo has appointed the two of them to develop the trust framework for the Consumer Consent Solution (CCS) in the GB retail energy market. Raidiam brings the digital trust infrastructure that underpins the framework’s design; PayPoint delivers the operational service model and service management to run it as an enduring service rather than a short-lived programme.
The aim is deceptively simple and genuinely significant: a single, standard way for consumers to control how their energy data is accessed and used. It’s one of the first vanguard initiatives to share consumer and business energy data at this scale – the foundation for many more exciting initiatives around a customer’s data. A common consent model means less fragmentation, better interoperability, and a market consumers can actually trust.
As Raidiam’s John Heaton-Armstrong put it: “Trusted consent infrastructure is essential to Consumer-Led Flexibility, and the decisions made now will help shape a market that is more secure, interoperable and consumer-led.”
We’d go further. The same principles that made Open Banking work – consent, identity, trust frameworks, real-time data sharing done securely and at scale – are now being applied to energy. When that pattern jumps from one regulated sector to the next, it stops being an industry conversation and becomes a national one. That’s why this feels like a potentially seismic moment.
Watch this space
We’re very happy at obconnect that we helped put this partnership in a place to flourish. Two organisations we know well, trust completely, and have built real things alongside – now shaping the consent infrastructure for an entire sector.
There are global conversations happening and domestic opportunities opening up, and we look forward to working together more. Great minds, it turns out, are even better when they collide.
obconnect provides Open Banking, Confirmation of Payee and Verification of Payee technology to banks, building societies, corporates and regulators worldwide. If consent, data sharing or payee verification is on your horizon, get in touch.
