Payments NZ chief calls for stronger interoperability

Payments NZ Chief Executive Steve Wiggins called for a stronger focus on payments interoperability in Aotearoa New Zealand, saying it underpins the reliability and resilience of the country's payments system.

He said the system depends on long-term coordination and investment across the organisations that move money through the economy each day. Attention on newer tools such as faster payments, open banking, richer data, digital identity and AI, he argued, should not distract from the need to ensure different systems work together securely and consistently.

Wiggins said interoperability means payment systems and institutions can operate through shared standards and rules, allowing transactions to move between providers regardless of the bank a customer uses or the technology behind the service. He described that common framework as central not only to efficiency, but also to the system's ability to keep operating during disruption.

The scale of the system adds to the pressure. Wiggins said New Zealand's clearing systems process more than $8 trillion in value each year, while interbank payments now run seven days a week, including weekends and public holidays.

That shift has changed public expectations. Households, companies and government agencies now expect payments to be available at all times, placing greater responsibility on the infrastructure that supports day-to-day economic activity.

Shared standards

Wiggins said reliable payments infrastructure has become as important to the economy as many essential utilities. Any loss of confidence in the system, he said, would be felt quickly across businesses and consumers, making resilience a broader economic concern rather than a narrow technical one.

He described resilience as the ability of systems to withstand disruption, recover quickly and continue enabling transactions with confidence. That, he said, goes beyond simply preventing outages.

One example he cited was the migration to ISO 20022, a global payments messaging standard. He said the move improves data quality, supports automation and strengthens fraud detection by giving banks and payment providers a common language for payments.

He argued that the benefits of ISO 20022 depend on coordinated adoption across the sector rather than isolated implementation by individual institutions. Shared progress across the industry, in his view, matters more than separate advances by single organisations.

Open banking

Wiggins also linked the issue to open banking. While the technology is becoming more widely available, he said, its long-term success will depend on trusted governance, clear standards and consistent implementation across the wider payments ecosystem.

The same questions arise with tokenisation and AI, he said, especially as those tools become more involved in creating, verifying or acting on payment instructions. That raises questions about authority, consent and accountability that cannot be resolved by one organisation alone, he said.

For that reason, Wiggins said collaboration across the industry remains essential. Interoperability depends on shared standards, and resilience depends on shared responsibility, requiring coordination across industry participants, regulators and government, he said.

Wiggins said New Zealand is starting from a solid position, with a payments system that is trusted, well governed and still evolving. The task now, he said, is to strengthen the foundations beneath new services as the system changes.

"Because when payments work well, nobody notices. And that's exactly the point. The most successful payments systems are the ones people never have to think about," said Wiggins, Chief Executive, Payments NZ.