obconnect extends its New Zealand partnership, and the data tells the real story.
September 27th 2026 – Two years ago, New Zealand made a bold call. Faced with rising payment fraud, the New Zealand Banking Association went looking for the best in the world. They scoured the globe, consulting high-end firms and market leaders across multiple continents. After a rigorous and transparent competitive tender, one that attracted some of the world’s biggest technology brands, they chose a specialist. A UK-headquartered, FCA-regulated open banking infrastructure company that had spent years proving its model in the UK. They chose obconnect.
It was, as Simon Lyons of obconnect, puts it, it’s one of those moments that defines a company. “We knew we’d contributed to the thinking and design. We also fully expected a big-four to win. When the decision came, it was genuinely one of the proudest moments in obconnect’s history. New Zealand trusted us. Now, two years on, they’ve chosen us again.”
That second choice matters even more than the first. Renewals are earned, not given.
The Numbers That Won the Renewal
The independent survey data from Talbot Mills Research, published in March 2026, tells the story that contract negotiations rarely capture. Conducted across 1,047 nationally representative New Zealand adults, the research paints a picture of a service that has become genuinely embedded in how Kiwis think about sending money.
Thirty-seven percent of New Zealanders now encounter or actively use the Confirmation of Payee check on a weekly basis. Among those under 30, adoption reaches 54%. Among high-income households, 47%. Among those who use it weekly, 88% say it gives them much more or somewhat more confidence when making a bank transfer. Even among those who said they don’t use the check, 52% reported that simply knowing it exists made them feel more confident.
The hard outcomes are equally compelling. Thirteen percent of users say CoP has stopped them from making an incorrect payment. Five percent say it has helped them avoid a scam. When CoP caught an error, the most common experience, in 45% of cases, was being prompted to recheck details before sending. In 24% of cases, a name and number mismatch was flagged. In 22% of cases, the user had entered the wrong payee name entirely. These are not edge cases. These are everyday near-misses, caught by a system that works.
“The data confirms what the banks have been telling us,” says Duncan Robertson, CEO of GetVerified, the entity created to govern and operate New Zealand’s CoP ecosystem. “This service is delivering the outcomes it was designed for. Consumers are more confident, misdirected payments are being caught, and scams are being flagged before money moves. That’s the whole point.”
“The renewal reflects both the performance of the technology and the quality of the partnership. ” From the outset, the priority was to move at pace and deliver a genuinely effective fraud prevention tool for New Zealanders. obconnect delivered, in just over six months, ten banks were live, covering the vast majority of consumer accounts in New Zealand. “The decision to extend reflects our confidence in both the team and the platform.”
The Model That Made It Possible
What made the New Zealand deployment exceptional was not just what was built, but how it was built. Rather than asking each bank to design, procure and maintain its own Confirmation of Payee infrastructure, the model that has cost UK banks hundreds of millions of pounds individually and taken years to deliver, obconnect designed a centralised, cloud-native ecosystem. Banks connect to two APIs and make light-touch journey changes. The intelligence, the matching logic, the trust framework, the security architecture – all of it sits centrally, maintained by obconnect, inherited instantly by every bank that connects.
The result was something the global payments industry had never quite seen before. An entire national CoP scheme, built and live in under seven months. Twenty-four account issuers (including banks) now live. Over 97% of New Zealand’s consumer bank accounts covered. Hundreds of millions of transactions processed. A model so clean that Duncan Robertson and the GetVerified board were able to govern it effectively from day one, with full bank buy-in.
The continuation of the obconnect partnership by GVL was supported by the data. The next two years will show what a framework built for confidence, speed and extensibility can become, when the people operating it have already proved they can deliver.
For more information, contact Simon Lyons, obconnect: simon.lyons@obconnect.io | www.obconnect.io
obconnect is a wholly owned subsidiary of PayPoint plc, regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 935017). GetVerified is the bank-owned entity governing New Zealand’s Confirmation of Payee ecosystem, established by the New Zealand Bankers’ Association.
