Exploring New Zealand’s Fintech Future with Adrian Smith

Episode Transcript (computer-generated)

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand tech podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and very pleased to have Adrian Smith, the founder and chief executive of BlinkPay joining us. How are you, Adrian?

Adrian Smith:
Kia ora, Paul. Are you well? I’m.

Paul Spain:
Well, I am Kia ora. Look, it’s been how long since you started BlinkPay?

Adrian Smith:
I didn’t start BlinkPay myself. It was started by Daniel Karehana in 2015. He started life as bank links. He had this idea, this for Cardo, that if you could connect data from disparate financial systems and put it all in one place for customers, they had like a dashboard view of their lives. We could create value. And the original idea for BlinkPay was this idea of placing people’s bills in the same place they manage their finances, which is their mobile banking app. So that was the original idea, 2015. So he started.

Adrian Smith:
Then I joined BlinkPay and when I joined September 2021. And so I’ve been on the journey for about three years and in our second month or month one. Yeah, so that’s how long we’ve been doing Blink Power. I’ve been doing it.

Paul Spain:
Wow. Well, so, yeah, quite a, Quite a, quite a journey then. This is not a, not a five minute thing at all.

Adrian Smith:
No, no, it’s not an overnight success as we’re talking pre pod.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Adrian Smith:
What’s that old saying? Takes seven years to be an overnight success in technology and it’s very much that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, walk us through, you know, what, what is the, you know, what is the focus of BlinkPay today and how has that sort of changed and adjusted since the initial ideas?

Adrian Smith:
Yeah, so Dan originally started this idea of bills into mobile banking apps and then Covid hit, the world changed. A lot of the banks said, ooh, this innovation idea on bills seems like a stretch right now we’ve got customers to serve in other ways. And so Dan, in a classic startup founder sense, had to pivot and so he realized that the open banking standard that had been established in the UK was coming out into New Zealand. He said, well, open banking is based on APIs, application programming interfaces. Do you know what an API is, Paul? Is that worth an explainer?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. I mean a lot of our audience will, but there’ll be some who aren’t familiar. So.

Adrian Smith:
So the metaphor we like to use, it’s a waiter in a restaurant. That’s what an API is. And so if you wander in to your table, like my smartphone, the waiter runs up and says, how can we help you today? And you say, I’d like to order the roast chicken from the kitchen. Then the waiter wanders off to the kitchen, the back office funct and says to the kitchen, hey, table 12 needs roast chicken. Then the kitchen does what it needs to do to make the roast chicken. Then the waiter brings back the roast chicken, says, here’s your roast chicken. That’s all an API does. All it does is collects and fetches and sends data between 2 points or multiple points.

Adrian Smith:
That’s all it is.

Paul Spain:
I like that sort of description. It’s broken down into something that everybody can understand.

Adrian Smith:
Yeah, well, the show doc said, please explain it simply, Adrian. So I was trying to avoid all the technobabble.

Paul Spain:
No, I love it. In fact it’s better than any explanation I’ve given of an API before. So I’m taking lessons here from you.

Adrian Smith:
So thanks, mate. So then we started pivoting towards open banking because it was built on the exact same tech that we’d built for our bills platform. And along the way we sort of said, well actually there’s a real opportunity here to help everyday New Zealanders be better off through better tech. And so that’s kind of. Our Kaupapa is like we started with payments because that’s where the industry started and we felt payments are really expensive. We found it difficult to really wrap our minds around why we were spending so much money at point of sale through cards and other mechanisms that felt inefficient and frankly out of date. Like, would you be shocked to know that two of the main payment mechanisms New Zealand uses today, direct debits and credit cards, were invented in 1966?

Paul Spain:
Interesting. Yeah, they’ve been around for a long time, but yeah, that’s a really long time.

Adrian Smith:
Yeah. And so we retrofit them. We retrofit them for the modern day. Like that makes no sense to me. So we felt is there modern day alternatives and replacements that we can do to leverage the digital age and help move data and money around more efficiently? Because we believe in. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have this notion of these three foundational concepts for a digital economy. One, digital identity, which we can all agree is probably largely absent. New Zealand.

Adrian Smith:
It’s not where it needs to be the instant and efficient transfer of data which we’re hoping underneath the customer product data bill from Minister Bailey will enable that. And within open banking we’re doing that to a degree. And then the third thing is efficient and real time transfer. Of funds and payments, which we’re trying to work towards as an industry and we’re trying to do via open banking, but there’s still better work to do there. So we feel like those are things that New Zealand needs in order to be a true digital economy. And so that’s what we’re trying to work toward. And we’re trying to help everyday New Zealanders like have better access to financial products and services because we believe in financial enablement. If we can enable you with tools, capabilities, knowledge and education to make better, more informed choices, then you’re in a better position to create wealth and help your whanau be better off.

Adrian Smith:
So we feel like that’s the right answer.

Paul Spain:
What are the downsides of, I guess the older mechanisms like the credit card for instance.

Adrian Smith:
So the thing with say credit cards is you need to have a physical card. Now if you go to do an online payment, e commerce payment, which is known as a card not present payment, 10 to 12% of those payments fail for various reasons. They’re also one of the highest fraud. And so there’s a lot of work that’s been going on via tokenisation with cards. Like instead of giving away the details, can we have a token creator that then obfuscates that and has a different proxy identifier for that. So there’s a lot of work going on in the card space to try and obviate those things and fraud controls, but it’s just challenging. And then there’s the case of, well, do I need a plastic card? Are there other options available to me? What can I do? Like every time you use PayWave, we pay significant fees, which is why you see a lot of local small companies, little dairies and whatnot. They don’t offer PayWave because the fees are too much for them to absorb.

Adrian Smith:
And there are those who then pass on those charges to their customers and some even pass on surcharges. So charges on top of charges. And it’s just all it does, all it adds up to is we’re making things more expensive for everyday New Zealanders, which in a cost of living crisis just seems like the wrong answer.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. There is so often a technological solution or a technology as part of the solution to issues. Right. So yeah, really, really interesting. And so before we, we delve in further, I should say a big thank you to our show partners. Of course, big thank you to One NZ, Spark, 2degrees, HP and Gorilla Technology for their support of the show. But I’m curious.

Adrian Smith:
I love a show. Rude. Awesome.

Paul Spain:
Gotta Be done. It’s important, otherwise we’re not here.

Adrian Smith:
Right. Gotta give love back to the support, to the sponsors. Right.

Paul Spain:
Definitely, definitely now, yeah, the bit that we probably didn’t delve into and I think this is important for sort of setting the scene is BlinkPay and BNZ have come together. Tell us about the deal that you’ve done.

Adrian Smith:
Oh my gosh, where to start? We’ve been working on the open banking stand with industry. We’re working with all the different banks and all the various stakeholders across the industry. And when we first started chatting with the bank of New Zealand, it became quite evident, at least to me and at least to us at BlinkPay, that they were really, really keen on this new standard. They were really, really keen to see what could they do to help bring this into the world. And I think the most elegant evidence of that is they had their payment APIs available and consumable by us in October of 2021, which was nearly three years ahead of the industry deadline of May of this year. So they were the earliest movers on this stuff and they really had this forward looking view of actually we think this could change, fundamentally change the infrastructure of New Zealand financial services industry and they really, really wanted to sort of be at the forefront of that and do that work in that space. So when we met, it was like meeting a kindred spirit with much deeper pockets. Every time I’d have conversations about the future and what it might look like in terms of products and services from a financial services perspective, they had brilliant ideas and what about this and what about that? So they’re looking at things like can we remove the pain of payment dishones? So under the existing direct debit scheme, if you have a direct debit set up and you’re unaware of when the funds come out, suddenly funds disappear from your account and if you have insufficient, you get a payment dishonor which then has fees and charges.

Adrian Smith:
And if you go into unplanned overdraft, there’s this cumulative effect of bad. And they’re like, what can we do to obviate that? What can we do to make that better? And so these are the questions I preoccupied with. How can we remove the inefficiencies and loss in the system? So when they said to us, hey, how would you feel about this? I was like, we’d feel pretty good. Depends on what you say suggesting though. And for anyone who’s ever being through an acquisition or an exit, that’s a full time job. That part was eye opening. It’s really, really hard to do the day job and then focus on all the questions and everything related to exiting a company, structure an entity. So if anyone’s out there thinking about it, yeah, hire someone to run the business during the day and focus on the exit because it requires all that effort.

Adrian Smith:
But the really cool side, how long did that take? The very first conversation about it was in August of last year.

Paul Spain:
Okay.

Adrian Smith:
So probably about 14 months. There was a bit of to and fro ing. There was a bit of a slow start because Christmas intervened, so we started in the new year. But it’s quite the effort because you put in, you go through due diligence with the potential purchases and they basically want to go through your data room and they want to check out your fundamentals of your business, like compliance, policies, governance, et cetera, as well as forecast, financial management. All the things that a bank, which is going to be a prudential situation where they have these responsibilities, they’re going to look into it, say, are you fit for purpose? Are you fit and proper to participate in the ecosystem and partner with us? And so they go through all of that and it’s all useful stuff. They look at, they do tech due diligence, they look at the tech stack, they bring in experts to evaluate that, which is fun. So, Adrian, tell us about a lot of those questions. But ultimately a really, really rewarding exercise because you get to the end of it, you’re exhausted, you’re exhilarated, you’re happy, you think you’re not sure.

Adrian Smith:
And then when it happens, and then you actually get to do really, really cool things for your staff and your investors. And then you realize, looking forward. Holy heck, we now have this wicked partner, or wicked owner. Owner’s more accurate, who has brilliant resources, has brilliant teams, has a massive network, and they’re saying, how can we find synergies here to work together? That is the right question. It’s been pretty cool. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Oh, well, congratulations. Not sure if you’re able to share any sort of details on the financials.

Adrian Smith:
Is that it’s an undisclosed sum, Paul. That’s what I’ve said to everyone and Will Mace from nbrf. You’re listening? Yes. Doesn’t matter how often you ask the question, it’s undisclosed. He asked me five times, couldn’t believe it. He’s like, I’m gonna keep on asking till you give me something. So I don’t know if you saw the headline nbr, where I went, look, as I said to friends in whnau, it’s Heaps. Heaps.

Paul Spain:
I love that. That’s the Kiwi way.

Adrian Smith:
But that was just part of it, right there was the acquisition of all the shares by the bank of New Zealand, but then there’s the working capital position on the other side. So we’ve got commitments for a serious amount of fuel to pour in the fire for open banking. And looking at our backlog of all the things that we wanted to build, we had to have a really slim focus as a startup because we had a short capital Runway. You know, when you’re a startup you only thinking increments of sort of 12, 15, 18 months. Every board meeting you have is how much longer do we have left? And so you then tend to have a very narrow focus and try and do one or two things really, really well. But in this scenario we can do a few more than two things simultaneously, which is pretty exciting. The question then becomes, well, what do we prioritize first? What makes the most sense for New Zealand and New Zealanders and what can we do to really drive home this advantage we’re getting of having all this capital to build? Cool stuff.

Paul Spain:
Now tell me about working with bnz. As someone who’s had interactions with sort of a range of banks in differing ways from sitting inside the belly of the beast in London where I did a little bit of work for NatWest, heard of them, a Y2K project and look that up. If you’re a younger listener and you don’t know what Y2K was, but sort of seeing there and certainly seeing some inefficiencies and some wastage through to also seeing some of the cutting edge stuff that our Kiwi banks have done, including with interactions with bnz. I’m kind of curious what’s the good and the bad? Obviously you’ve already mentioned how BNZ were really at the forefront API wise and certainly some previous interactions with the digital team at bnz, you know, quite impressed me. But also the flip side, they’re a big entity, lots of regulations and banks aren’t traditionally known for being the fastest movers. So what is that experience like for you?

Adrian Smith:
I have a lot of aroh for big banks, Having spent nearly 15 years in big British banks. I was digital director of Barclays bank in the UK for a period of time and so I understand the slings and arrows from both sides. When you’re on the outside looking and you’re like, come on guys, you have all the money and the people and everything. What’s taking so bloody long? And it can get quite frustrating because when you startup life, like the only committee I have is I look in the mirror and go, shall we do this? And I go, yeah, okay, let’s do it. And that’s the whole decision making process. We like it, let’s do it. When you’re in a bank though, and you’re in a regulated industry, you’ve got all these stakeholders and committees you need to go through to make sure the bank is comfortable from a risk position perspective. Because what you’re trying to do when you’re in a bank is there’s the line of risk and you try and figure out, well, how close do we get to the line and what are we comfortable with? And the challenge I always found when I was in a major British bank is when you’re in that situation, everyone’s really worried about protecting the banking license.

Adrian Smith:
99 times out of 100, do nothing wins the moment the risk officer’s in the room. And so it’s this constant tension between protecting the banking license as well as trying to do good for customers. And not everyone gets it right. So I have a sense of both sides from the. Let’s start with the cons of being in a big bank. You have hierarchies, you have stair codes, you have all of the most convoluted decision making processes you can possibly imagine. When you’re a little tiny startup where your decision making process is looking in the mirror. So it feels really disproportionate.

Adrian Smith:
However, all of those things exist to protect the bank and the banking license and all the customers of the bank. We don’t want banks to go belly up and people lose their money, because that is the wrong answer. How do we strike that balance between being prudent but also trying to serve our customers in the best way possible? So that part’s pretty challenging. On the plus side is we now have access to a massive network of merchants. Amazing. We have access to these relationship managers who are talking to the top end of town, like the sponsor of the show, saying, hey, we’ve got some cool things you might be able to work on. And so we can go with them hand in hand to like a one New Zealand or a Spark and say, hey, here’s all the really cool stuff we’re working on that might be useful, might solve some problems for you. What do you think? So there’s the pros and cons of each side, but I think for us, in sum, there are so many good things like for those in their work in banking, bank benefits off the charts, like Brilliant.

Adrian Smith:
Like when you’re a startup, pretty much no benefits, everyone comes in on a discount. We all foolishly believe in the vision and the dream and we come in at massively discounted rates. And you have to make arguments like, look, if you want to maximize your income, continue to pursue what you’re doing over there, but if you want to maximize your impact on your fellow New Zealanders, you’ll consider us, please take the discount rate. And that’s the sort of things you have to do when you’re dealing with big banks. They have all the benefits around life insurances and all sorts of things that help make your quality of life just that little bit better. So once you’re part of that large family, you have access to those sorts of things which are pretty cool. Like, who doesn’t want to have all of their whnau covered in the event that we should happen while you’re working for a big bank? Or, you know, like the ability to skip the line to get to doctors and whatnot because you’ve got the private medical. So all these good things.

Adrian Smith:
So we’re trying, trying to maximize all the good things and trying to minimize the cons side of things, the challenges.

Paul Spain:
Of being part of a big organisation with all the things that come with that.

Adrian Smith:
And I will give credit to the bank of New Zealand, everyone I’ve met have said to me words to the effect of, hey, I’m so and so looking after this function. We’re really, really conscious that we have responsibilities too. X, Y and Z, the regulator, blah, blah, blah. But we’re also very conscious that we don’t want to slow you down needlessly. So we’ve built a plan that we think might be the best way to navigate all that, to allow you to be nimble and fast. However, it’s not locked down. If you want to have a conversation about that, we’re open to that. We’re keen to edit, add, amend, whatever you think makes sense.

Adrian Smith:
But we’re very, very clear as we do not want you to lose your speed. And that’s cool.

Paul Spain:
How good is that? That’s awesome. And I think when we step back and we were chatting before we started BlinkPay as an entity, and I think this is probably very common of startups, you go, you do something, you operate at pace and what gets achieved as a startup, often it’s sort of night and day difference of what might have been able to be achieved as some sort of thing within a bigger entity. And so you’re bringing something to the table. That, well, if BNZ could have done it, they would have done it. Right. But they hadn’t. So that’s why they needed to acquire you. And so you bring this thing to the table that they hadn’t managed to achieve on their own and then it’s kind of, yeah, getting that to work well together inside this environment that, you know, probably would not have come out with BlinkPay if it were an internal, an internal thing and really getting that to mesh and mill together.

Paul Spain:
So you keep the best of your independent startup but with those extra things that come with being part of the bank.

Adrian Smith:
Oh, exactly right. And like with the greatest of respect, those people I’ve worked in, in all the major banks, they’re all trying to do good. Like there’s this narrative around Australian owned banks, but there’s actually really good Kiwis in there trying to make a difference and they’re really good people and I adore most of the people. Not all of them, most of them.

Paul Spain:
Not all of them.

Adrian Smith:
They know who they are and so they’re trying to do good for New Zealand. And I have no doubt if they didn’t have to negotiate, navigate the internal maze of compliance and governance and sign offs and stair codes to do things, I’m pretty certain they could have got there in and of themselves. But they have a slightly different contract they’re working within. We come in, we’ve got an entirely different contract built on pace and being nimble and trying to solve customer problems and we don’t have the same overhead because we don’t have the benefit of building a massive machine that just churns out revenue more. Now we don’t have that, we’re trying to get to that. And so because we’ve done that, we’re very non conformist in our views. If you’re in a large complex machine, you’re kind of taught to conform, to make sure the machine just keeps on running. Whereas if you’re non conformist, then the conformist side of the equation goes, oh my God.

Adrian Smith:
I can tell you categorically, when I was working in British banking, I saw two innovation functions get completely crushed by coming into the mothership. What happens is you’ve got this group of innovative folks thinking differently, totally thinking different than everyone else, and then they go into the mothership and say, hey, we’ve got this clever crazy thing. And then I would say, doesn’t solve any of my problems. Bugger off. What happens is the moment the mothership realizes it’s being disintermediated by Someone within, then the, the mothership antibodies start to kill the infection. And that’s part of the challenge of having an innovation function within a large successful organisation. And that’s why if you read all the various sort of strategic management books and all this stuff and if you talk to the guys out of Samford, they advocate for a pirate ship that’s separate and distinct to the mothership. And so not that we’re pirates, but we’ve got a very much a pirate ship mothership model going on at the moment.

Adrian Smith:
And the mothership’s trying really, really hard to arm us, which is really, really cool. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Do you have others within your sphere who are placing bets on whether you’re still going to be around doing your stuff in five, 10 years time and whether it plays out well with the bank?

Adrian Smith:
There’s a lot of speculation about that actually. Yeah. Like there’s been some scuttlebutt that the move is a little bit anti competitive for the New Zealand market. And so I’ve had to say more than once, no, this isn’t a catch and kill, this is a catch. And basically work together to try and amplify everything that’s going on in New Zealand. Because I have the advantage of. I saw the beginning of open banking in the UK and I was across that. And so I can see the potentiality of it and where it might go.

Adrian Smith:
Well, there’s a lot of narrative out of Australia, other regions and geographies how it hasn’t really worked, but there’s a bunch of reasons why. And it’s like anything. You can take a blunt and unsophisticated view and say it doesn’t work. Or you can take a nuanced view and say, well, here’s what actually worked. For these reasons we’re very focused on the what worked and what reasons were there for that, what must be true. Most of it’s around customer pain. If you can remove customer pain and friction, you’re gonna win. And that’s the goal.

Adrian Smith:
And so the bank of New Zealand, they basically look, we feel like, and I’m not speaking for Dan Huggins, this is just kind of my reflection of the conversation I’ve been in. So my words do not reflect bank of New Zealand. Usual caveats here. My views are my own.

Paul Spain:
But thank you, Adrian, for clarifying that. It’s really important to us as the listeners that we don’t get mixed up.

Adrian Smith:
Don’t get mixed up. These are not BlinkPay views now, these are Adrian’s views. But the really strong Impression I got throughout was, hey, we feel like these APIs and this new connectivity, that’s the future of financial services in Aotearoa and we feel like it’s all going to be won and lost in the next sort of three to five years. And so we really, really want to pour fuel on what you’re doing there because we feel like that is the right direction of travel.

Paul Spain:
Now talk to us about the open banking sort of and payment landscape maybe a little bit around, you know, what you learnt in the uk because the UK seems to have, you know, very much been at the forefront. Whether it’s you’re comparing the UK with New Zealand, comparing the UK with that country up there, it’s had an election recently, the United States, that crazy place where, you know, you, let’s not get.

Adrian Smith:
Political, let’s not get political.

Paul Spain:
You kind of think that they’re innovative and cutting edge with all their tech startups and companies, but you look at the banking and then you can’t join up the dots. But yeah, so yeah, I’m kind of curious about the state of UK and your learnings there and then how we would compare that to New Zealand and the opportunity and where we were at in that journey.

Adrian Smith:
Yeah, so it’s like anything when you compare different jurisdictions and geographies. Right. Context matters. In the UK it was very much regulatory driven. The first nine banks were told do this thing or else. And so it was treated like a regulatory regime program. So every bank was doing well, not every bank, but typically you have this view of we’ll do just enough to not get in trouble with the regulator, which isn’t really customer focused or first. And so it’s really good at getting everyone moving together in concert.

Adrian Smith:
They just only move as far as is necessary to comply, which is not always helpful. So that was the UK experience. It was very interesting though because the UK started with data and I can tell you from my firsthand experience of having ingested other banks data into the Barclays mobile banking app, the data was pretty crap originally. The problem with data is the more you surface it for customers, the more they can see the inaccuracies or the things that they don’t agree with. The more they pick up the phone and say what the chuffing heck is this? What I learned, the bitter, most bitter of ways was if you’re servicing NatWest data in the Barkers mobile banking app, my Barkeys customer doesn’t care. It’s NatWest data. They see crap in my app. So I need to Fix it.

Adrian Smith:
And you can’t do this whole finger pointy but it’s them over there because it’s a very weak position to take. So the data part was really, really awkward. And then the other challenge out of the UK was the UK had no action initiation. You couldn’t do anything. I remember when we like here’s all the banks in our app, Yay. Now what? We can see them and what else we can see them. I’m like that’s not particularly helpful. And so they had this thing called reconstruct in the UK we had to reconstant to your data every 90 days and our reconstruct rates were less than desirable.

Adrian Smith:
Let’s go on that because what’s the point? Why am I reconsent to my data coming in from Natware, Sabs and everywhere else if all I can do is just look at it and do nothing with it? And so that’s where the New Zealand jurisdictions said well we’ll start with action, let’s do payments and then we’ll do the data afterwards. And I don’t know if that’s better. But starting with payments allows people to do stuff and get some sort of meaningful tangible thing out of open banking. When I look at America, have you ever looked at the banking industry over there? It’s a mess. I think there’s like three the last time I checked which was years ago. It’s probably different now but it’s an.

Paul Spain:
Anti Silicon Valley, isn’t it? Their banking system? It’s the opposite, it’s backwards.

Adrian Smith:
There’s like three the last time I looked at this, please don’t fact check me. But it was like something like three thousand 660 banks in the US and you’ve got, you can either go for a regional banking license or a national one. A national one to the best of my knowledge is really fricking hard to get. And so you’ve got this really, it’s this really fractured landscape. And so open banking in a place like the US where it can bring a common language and a common way to exchange data feels like a good thing because over in the US it’s filled with screen scrapers doing all those other styles of connections that aren’t particularly sanctioned but it works for that context. Now I’m hopeful that the Americans really grasp it on open bank and they’ve made comments about that and bringing it in. I think that’d be useful. When I look at our cousins over the ditch in Australia they really focused on their data regime CDR and arguably they were overly prescriptive and raised the bar so high that no one could participate.

Adrian Smith:
And I don’t know if you saw the recent report where over 2 billion was spent on it and less than 0 point something percent were actually using it. So that feels like an opportunity missed. But again, context matters. Their jurisdiction, they have very, very clear things and problems they’re trying to solve for. And their map, their roadmap was different to the uk which is different to America, which is going to be different to us. Our roadmap has been, well, let’s, we’re doing this together as an industry based effort so there is no regulator standing behind us whipping, cracking the whip, which has its own pros and cons. And when you move in a caravan like that, you can only move as quick as the slowest moving vehicle or member of the caravan. And if one of the large banks decides to drag their heels, it nobbles the whole industry because we wouldn’t have.

Paul Spain:
A bank doing that, would we?

Adrian Smith:
I couldn’t possibly comment a length on that. Each bank does things in their own way. That makes sense. But what I would say is when you go to a merchant, say, hey, new payment services and they say, who have you got? Like, well, we’ve got three other big four banks and they go, oh, that’s cool bro, but when you got all four, then call me then. And so not having someone in the tent is really, really difficult and it really, really impedes your ability to actually on sell and start to bring about these new capabilities and services for folks which cost material less than what exists today.

Paul Spain:
And for those that aren’t familiar, maybe you can just speak to Monzo because they’ve been quite a big kind of player in the uk. So just, you know, it would be, it would be.

Adrian Smith:
This wasn’t on the show sheet. Is this you, Jo Ellen? You’re doing research, aren’t you? And you’re sending stuff in.

Paul Spain:
That’s what’s happening here.

Adrian Smith:
All right, all right, I see what’s going on now. That’s what the secret things. Okay, I got it. What would you like to say about Monzo?

Paul Spain:
Well, just, you know, I think as an entity and you’re going to know a million times more, you know, about this stuff than me. But it’s just a name that always seems to come up when we’re talking around these sort of, you know, topics of open banking and, you know, going digital with things. But most of us in New Zealand would have no idea, you know, what have they done? And you know, what’s the, you know, what lessons can we learn?

Adrian Smith:
So many lessons. But before I dive into Monzo, I’m gonna do a little bit of preamble as to what enabled Monzo to come about in their regulatory environment. So in the uk, the PRA off the back of the GFC said, look.

Paul Spain:
You know what, the what?

Adrian Smith:
The pra, the Prudential Regulatory Authority. Oh, okay, all right. Their rbnz, okay. Their RBNZ said, hey, yeah, we’ve got this cosy oligopoly, tends to have 85% of the market. Don’t know if that sounds familiar. And we wanted to bring more competition into the UK market. So they said, actually we’re going to bring in this, we’re going to change the rules of the small banking license. We’re going to lower the capital necessary to 1 million pounds or euros, which, whichever is greater to get you a small banking license, which would enable NEO banks.

Adrian Smith:
So NEO banks, for the avoidance of doubt, they don’t have branches, it’s all digital, they don’t have any of that stuff. So they get rid of all of that footprint and the cost associated with it because the capitalists are bank with a high streak presence, eye watering. Anyway, so they did that and then 18 banks were spawned in the following five years between 2012 and 2018, of which Monza was one of them, Starling, Atom, Metro and others. And it really ushered in a new kind of, of thinking and a new way of being. And what really, really worked for Monzo’s and Banks without ilk is they had this wonderful customer experience. They put you, the customer Paul, at the heart of everything they designed. And they said, look, I want to make it as easy as possible for you to create a relationship with our banking app ecosystem and we want to try and tailor everything we build for you. Now from a pure revenue profit driven perspective.

Adrian Smith:
That’s not really a way to make money, but it’s a way to get a lot of custom.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, I did remember, yeah, noticing that their revenue wasn’t that necessarily very high, but they got something like 10 million. Oh yeah, customers.

Adrian Smith:
And I remember meeting Tom Blomfeld, the original founder at Barclays and he was coming in, he was telling our executive team how they’re going to eat our lunch. And I got bored into the conversation and I had a bit of a withering assessment on his eating of lunch narrative, to which I replied, look mate, you’re gonna eat our lunch with an app. We’ve been around for 330 years and we’ve survived two world wars. You’re gonna eat our lunch with an app. For real. You know, fast forward to today. They got 10 million customers. He might have been right, but at the time, I was like, who is this guy? You know, typical big bank mentality.

Adrian Smith:
Who are you? Go away. But what they did was they had this massively acute focus on trying to find meaningful things that help people solve problems, like the visualisation of your financial position, money coming in and out, different products and services to help you meet different needs. Like, if you go to someone in a big bank and you say, look, Paul or Adrian and person over here, they gotta do a blended family. They need a mortgage for their blended family, which has, you know, five children, 16 dogs and 10 cats. And what does that look like? All a bank is, is mortgage. They don’t really consider the context of the human aspects of it or the social aspect. And so Monzo and to a lesser degree, Starling really pushed into that space of what can we do socially to try and help people be better off? And I feel like there’s some players in the local market trying to do that. At the risk of name dropping some of my friends, I won’t do that.

Adrian Smith:
And so. But there’s so much room for more. Like, when I got back from the uk, it just broke my heart seeing the real lack of what was available in New Zealand versus what I’d seen in Europe and the uk. I’m like, we can do better. New Zealanders deserve better. So we’ve got to try to do better. Right? That’s what I feel like our mission is how can we do better for everyone? Because when I look at how many families are living hand to mouth week to week, I just feel like that’s the wrong answer. And what can we do to enable them to be better off? And again, that whole Nanaka, or the heart of our kind of mission is how can we help everyday New Zealanders be better off through better tech? And so that’s what we’re trying to do.

Adrian Smith:
And people like Amonzo, Anna Starling and others have led the way and said, hey, here’s what it looks like. Like, I was listening to a podcast and they said, apparently Revolut has now hit 50 million customers globally. Like, holy hicker. And as I’m sure you’re aware, they came into New Zealand, was it July last year? And so waiting to see kind of the broader impact of sort of their service offering in New Zealand. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
So sum up for us sort of, you know, where BlinkPay at, at the moment in terms of what you’ve got and how, how do you see the future potentially looking? If we look a few years out, yes.

Adrian Smith:
So where we’re at is we’ve focused on securing bilateral agreements with the big four banks for payment services. We’ve done that. We’ve got Payment gateway in the world. We’re now working on a whole suite of new payment services that we hope to bring into the world. At the risk of. Nah, it’s not really a risk because the whole industry’s doing it. There’s a feature, there’s a couple of features that are coming in and one of the ones that I’m gonna highlight here is one called Enduring Consent, which should come in in May of now. And what Enduring Consent is, it’s a modern replacement to direct debits and it allows you digitally to set up a mandate or a payment from your bank account to a merchant or a creditor account.

Adrian Smith:
And within the setup of that you can set up things like, well, what’s the maximum payment threshold? Like any payment over that we won’t agree to, but anything under just carry on. We can set the number of payments, we can set when to take the payments. So if you’re dealing with bills, you might want to have them taken on the due date. And what’s really cool about that is you’re now giving people alternatives to direct debits and give them a sense of control back for their funds. And what we’re seeking to do is we’re seeking to do some other clever things with the Enduring Consent to help people and merchants be better off. So one of the ones we’re looking at very, very deeply is, well, if you’re going to be this Enduring Consent and you’re going to make a payment every fortnight to or every month to one New Zealand as an example, what we can do as a third party provider is we can check to see if there’s sufficient funds in your account prior to the payment and then we can notify one New Zealand or yourself or both. Hey, Paul doesn’t have sufficient funds in the account. May want to give Paul a little nudge to remind him that he should have sufficient funds tomorrow in order to cover the payment.

Adrian Smith:
So that’s the kind of ways we’re thinking about some of the problems we’re looking at in the world. We’ve also got the data APIs in theory coming online. So I don’t know if you know Paul, but the deadline for the account information APIs for the industry is this Saturday 30th November, where the major banks are going to enable access to consumer accounts such as bank accounts, credit cards, loans, et cetera. And as part of that, third parties who are accredited, like a BlinkPay will be able to then, with your consent, access your data. So the use case that our good Minister Bailey tends to put into the universe is in Australia, you can get a mortgage in 10 minutes and the account information APIs enable that kind of capability. Can you imagine that? Like, you don’t have to wander in with a, how good would it be? I don’t have to go off and print stuff and statements. It’s all available in the API. I just say, yeah, I consent to you accessing my main account and then pulling back all that information and then a lending decision is made in 10 minutes.

Adrian Smith:
Right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s, that’s nuts. It can’t be that easy in every case, right? It can’t be. But there are obviously some that, that would fall within that scenario.

Adrian Smith:
Well, think about it. If you’re a mortgage lender, what are you looking for that isn’t available from the bank? And most of the data they hold, they know who you are, where you live, your direct credits or your payments into your account. They know your exposure in terms of whatever lending you’ve got already with cards and loans, et cetera. Then imagine bringing that all into a single aggregated space where you can actually see the whole picture. Someone like that. Get it, totally get it. But there’ll be others go, hey, you know, you see that? But I’ve got all this over here, like all these assets and stuff, I’m a good bit, you know, yeah, give me that damn mortgage, give me that good rate. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And so I just, I remember the pain as a business owner having to have it, you know, having to go through at one some point in history, I can’t remember exactly when it was, and they were like, oh, we need to see all of the company, you know, data and so on, as, as well as, you know, your own, your own personal stuff. So I’m sure there will be some of those cases. But the large majority, if you can get a, if you get a mortgage in 10 minutes, that could be dangerous.

Adrian Smith:
But how good would it be, right? Because instead of spending months and printing stuff off and annoying branches and I need a copy of my statements, I need proof of bank account. Yeah, it’s all in the API.

Paul Spain:
Does your head in.

Adrian Smith:
That’s so good. Right? And so when we look at the data services that are coming online. The new payment features that are going to be coming down the line next year, like one of them called Decoupled Flow. It’s a really, really interesting one where you can initiate a payment from anywhere and then the payment request gets sent directly to your mobile banking app. So for us, one of the obvious use cases is if I’m on the phone to one New Zealand and they say, hey, how you doing? Good, I’d like to pay the bill. Cool. With your permission, your consent, we can send that bill to your mobile banking app. Would you like to have that? It’s a seven minute window to complete the payment.

Adrian Smith:
Are you comfortable doing that now? Yeah. Cool. So you still log into the normal place, not sending you any links or any of that fraud victory type stuff. You’ll go somewhere that’s trusted and safe that you know that works. Then you go in there, you find the payment approval or if you’re really, really lucky, the bank of New Zealand have this wonderful mobile push notification capability that means you don’t have to look for it. They make it really, really easy. Just tap and deep link directly into the payment. Just saying, did you hear that bosses? Cool.

Adrian Smith:
And you then, then go make that payment and handle that in real time. Like it’s gonna be like no credit.

Paul Spain:
Card kind of fees or even a need to have a credit card. Right.

Adrian Smith:
None of that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, you can take that off the table because it does seem at the moment as though those without a credit card or you know, a debit card, you know, from one of the major international brands and all that, you know, come comes with that. So it could be youngsters, there’s a whole variety of scenarios I guess, and people that have just decided, look, we don’t want to be caught up in the dramas that credit cards can create in terms of debt and so on. Yeah, that sort of simplicity sounds fantastic.

Adrian Smith:
It does. Although to be fair, and I’m quite critical and withering on credit cards, but there are pros, right? The reason why their fees are high is because they have consumer guarantees and fraud protections. So if something goes sideways, you know, through the chargebacks and all that other capabilities and disputes, you’ll be able to get your money back. As an example, I recently purchased a rather large luxurious massage chair for my mother for Christmas and I thought, oh, I’m going to put this on my credit card just in case this is fraudulent. And so I did that by design, knowing of all the protections. So whilst the fees on cards are materially higher and there’s certain Flaws. There’s also certain advantages they have. And so I use the card in that particular scenario just in case.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, and that’s a good example. And we know that there has been a lot of fraud over the years.

Adrian Smith:
Do you know the scale of the fraud? Do you know how much we lost last year? What are the numbers? 210 million.

Paul Spain:
Sheesh.

Adrian Smith:
That’s why the banks are very, very specific in particular around who they lead into the ecosystem or not. And rightly so. That’s a lot of fraud for a little country like ours. 210 million. And then under the current regime, who’s on the hook for that?

Paul Spain:
I guess it impacts all of us. Right. It comes out in fees and everything else. We complain around all the fee structures, but it has to be paid for by somebody at some point in time.

Adrian Smith:
Oh, exactly. And I was talking to my lady about it the other night, and we’re talking about it. I said, you know what? It’s quite lucrative to get in fraud because the tools are pretty inexpensive these days. But that’s the tools they have access to now. And as a bank, how do you deal with all that? Like, this is the challenges that the financial services industry are grappling with. And so sometimes if they’re a bit awkward from an infosec perspective, that’s the kind of problems they’re trying to solve. And the fraudsters are moving at light speed. And so as a large financial institution and also as a third party connected to that, so how do we then try and keep pace with that? And how do we start to anticipate intact vectors, and how do we then handle what’s there today? Because they always go after the weakest link.

Adrian Smith:
And sadly, the weakest link is you and I. It’s not the tech, it’s the human. And they always go after that. And if you look at one of the largest fraud vectors in the uk, it’s called authorized pushpay or app, they’ll ring up and say, hey, Paul, we noticed some dubious transactions happening on the Gold coast of Australia. Are you in the Gold coast right now? No, I’m not. Oh, crap. Well, then we’re gonna send you a code so we can intercept that and block those transactions. We’re gonna send you that code.

Adrian Smith:
Can you please read it back to us? And they put you in this heightened state of distress where you’re not thinking anymore because your emotional brain kicks in. The limbic region goes, oh, my God, panic, panic, panic. And so suddenly you’re acting without thinking and you’re becoming unwittingly complicit in the fraud, and then you send the money away with your authorisation and the bank says it’s not a fraud, mate, you authorized it under duress. And so how do we even use these tools that the fraudsters are using to perpetrate the fraud to actually help consumers defend? The typical bank response is, well, they need to educate and we need to talk to the telcos and all these other things. Everyone is part of the ecosystem. But the question becomes, from my perspective is how are we using these tools to better arm our consumers, our own people, not to fall for these situations, to get better at the pattern recognition of a fraud and progress? And how do we then intercede in a meaningful but an emotionally intelligent way while they’re emotionally distressed to actually help obviate that particular issue?

Paul Spain:
One thing I’ve wondered about in these scenarios is particularly for those that are maybe in the groups that are susceptible. And we’ve got an episode coming up where one of the guests is Sir John Key, who’s sped some time involved in the banking world there himself, you know, at a board level. And so, you know, we were talking around, you know, some of these things and a thought that sort of came to mind actually, just as you were speaking there, though, it’s sort of just joining up some dots and you know, he was talking about sort of susceptibility. It’s, you know, often people who are a bit older, but not necessarily there are these groups of people who, and you probably see, you know, see some of the data who are more susceptible. But I do wonder whether you could have within your app platform a mechanism that sort of says, hey, if the banking system feels that there’s some sort of fraud or some sort of issue, that it can loop in a third party, a family member or something like that. Right.

Adrian Smith:
So cool.

Paul Spain:
So, you know, like if I’m, you know, and I’ve got a family member who I think is pretty switched on, but I still think wrong day, wrong time, coincidence of things, you know, would something happen. And it’s not an easy conversation to be having all the time. Other friends who have had a family member who’s been taken with one of these things, one of the phone calls, and, you know, whatever the circumstances were, they were able to have their arm twisted. But if you were able to build into your, your platform a kind of an automated phone, a friend type thing that just happens, if there’s something that triggers on the register, this is the sort of thing that we can get to.

Adrian Smith:
Oh, we can totally expect that. So there’s a couple of things I would highlight. So back to your point about Monzo, they built this feature that says Monzo’s calling you in their app. So if you get a phone call and it’s unsolicited, you can go and check in the app if that phone call’s coming from a registered Monzo agent. At Barclays, we built this thing called Trust Anchor, whereby we’d say, hey, Paul, it’s Adrian from Barclays. How do I know this is Barclays? You guys are all bloody liars and fraudsters. Well, do you have your phone with you, your smartphone? I’m assuming you’re on it right now? Yes, I do. You have the Barclays mobile banking app, correct? Yes.

Adrian Smith:
I’m going to send you a push notification in the app and you’ll go see and it’s going to say, hi, Paul, it’s Adrian from Barclays. Are you okay to proceed with this conversation? Gone then. And we’d send it and you’d go in, you’d go into the app, you’d see the notification saying exactly that. So actually, the financial technology providers in the UK have started grabbing this stuff years ago, and they’re actually a little bit ahead of the game. Actually, they’re a bit more ahead of the game than we are. But, you know, like anything, it’s not always the early. The early bit gets home, but there’s always the second mouse gets the cheese, and we’re very keen on the second mouse gets the cheese narrative because we’re a little bit behind. So there’s that and then there’s.

Adrian Smith:
The other thing is the insidious nature of these frauds, right? Like to the credit of another one of the major banks who I’m not owned by, they intercepted a fraud on my father’s account because his friend was being done by a romance scam. And they called my sister, who is the delegated authority on my father’s account, and said, your dad just got a big whack of money and he’s in here and he’s trying to send it to America. This seems unusual. And so she went, what the heck? And so she went in and dealt with that. But my father was so desperately trying to help his friend, he kept on trying, listened to his daughter, the accountant, or his son who knows banking. He had his own views.

Paul Spain:
As you do, as things happen, right? As you do, things happen. And it’s hard to get your head around it.

Adrian Smith:
But it’s just he was so fixated on helping his friend, though. And that’s the problem with these fraud attack vectors. They really go after our behavioural psychology, our patterns, the things that we do that we’re just going about life. But the engineering frauds to take advantage of our humanity, our good nature.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s a real, real challenge. I think there’s a whole lot more here we could delve into. We probably could go on for hours. Is there anything else on your mind that you think that listeners will be interested in, to close up the picture from here? Any other sort of key elements that we should cover off before we finish up?

Adrian Smith:
There’s a few things. Number one, from a regulation perspective in the Government, I think the work that’s going on with the Customer Product Data Bill, to get of ownership of data back to consumers, that’s awesome. So we’re cheering for Minister Bailey to get that through the House because one of the things that we spoke about at Parliamentary Select Committee meeting is underneath the Customer Product Data Bill, where everyone has the right to their own data, one of the things we worry about is, well, there’ll be certain providers who want to charge people to access their own data and there’ll be some parts of the economy, there’ll be some socioeconomic groups that can’t access their own data. And so the thing it’s meant to enable, to give you tools and the ability to do other things, there’ll be others who are just naturally excluded because it might be cost prohibitive. So we continue to urge Minister Bailey to get that through the House, but also be very thoughtful about what are we going to do from a fees and pricing perspective, because that’s important. But we think giving everyday whnau access to their own data to get better deals on energy, on cards, on lending, to make better choices. Like, can you imagine, you go into your conversational chat and your AI and and you say, oh crap, just had a Mechanic spill for 1500 bucks. Based on all that you know about my financial situation, what options might best suit me without this being advice, since this is a non advice channel.

Adrian Smith:
And then the AI then says, well, based on what we know about you and offers in the market, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it then surface up different options that you can interrogate and it helps people then navigate that and helps you make better choices based on what is known about you that’s coming. We think that’s really, really cool, particularly.

Paul Spain:
If people use it right, because sometimes it’s all very well having that capability, but there’s that sort of bringing people on board to a new way of thinking and operating. So that’s, I guess, a journey, right?

Adrian Smith:
Oh, exactly. Another thing we think is coming is we see. I don’t know about you, but I’m one of these guys where if I download another parking app, I’m gonna lose my mind. But I download a parking app, I’ll pay something, then I’ll delete the bloody thing as soon as I can. Like, we’ve got the. This preponderance of unused apps and so many apps. And, you know, why aren’t we following the Asian model of the super app, where you can manage your whole financial life in one place? I think that’s coming.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. I think there’s some simplicity of that sort of approach. So, yeah, definitely. I guess pros and cons in differing direction, depending on. Yeah, do you get sort of. Well, I guess that’s something we have to wait and see in terms of how that looks when it comes to, you know, when it comes to the New Zealand market.

Adrian Smith:
Oh, exactly. Right. If you look at. Have you ever been to use the gojek app in sort of Bali, where you can do things like you can hail rides and book haircuts and pay for it all in the same space. Like, instead of having armies and folders full of apps, you just got one app and it just does the whole shoot match? Like, why wouldn’t we want that? Why wouldn’t we want access to digital marketplaces where we can find the best offer? Why wouldn’t we want AI scientists? Hey, Paul, did you know that for everyone in your postcode with three bedrooms and 1.6 cats, they’re paying $27 less a month in energy than you are. Would you like to find out more? Yes, I’d love to find out more. What’s going on? Oh, blah, blah, blah. Energy retailer has got this introductory offer for the next 12 months, and this is the nuts and bolts, but you’ll save 27 bucks a month.

Adrian Smith:
Would you like us to sign you up for that? Yes, please. And then Agentic AI kicks in and does all the automation of all that and just gives you updates as it goes along through the various milestones that’s coming.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think there’s some pretty exciting stuff in there in terms of how that can come out and how that helps people and families. I guess I’m always looking for making sure we’ve got a bit of consumer choice, put it that way. Right. And I guess the open APIs mean that it’s not just gonna be one option in the market. For people. Right?

Adrian Smith:
Well the thing is you create a foundational platform that’s API driven, then anyone who’s got an API can plug in and participate in the ecosystem. And then what you have is you have this growing network of hopefully related things that are obviously not dodgy, that can then be used to help people be better off. The other thing I would probably observe too is let’s try and back our local founders and our local fintech companies. We’ve got some clever and talented folks in this country and they don’t get enough support from a capital perspective like. But it’s really, really hard running a startup on the smell of an oily rag because you can only do that for so long and it’s really, really hard to get that traction and that cut through, especially when you’ve got a bigger mission of trying to help people be better off, which is, I don’t know any fintech in New Zealand who isn’t trying to help people be better off in some meaningful way. So let’s give them some fuel, some gas for the tank. Come on guys, come on vc, stop looking over. Stop trying to find the next zero.

Adrian Smith:
I get it, everyone wants a global from day one zero kind of thing. Of course, and why wouldn’t you? But there are local guys trying to do good for local everyday Kiwis. Let’s give them some love too, please. Pretty please.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s important. And I do wonder how we do keep encouraging and making it easier for all of us to be able to invest in things other than just property and, and a Kiwisaver that’s putting money into, not into startups and so on. Right. So we’ve seen a little bit of that where Kiwisavers are able to invest into venture capital to a degree. I’d definitely like to see more of that.

Adrian Smith:
I would love to see more of this.

Paul Spain:
I love just a normal thing that when you go into a keyword we save a fund a certain slice of it depending on where you are in your savings, life journey and so on. But certainly at certain phases that it’s just completely the norm that a percentage of that goes into investing in startups at their varying phases.

Adrian Smith:
Wouldn’t that be good? Right, because they all invest in ETFs and really safe things. Understandable you’re dealing with people’s pensions.

Paul Spain:
But.

Adrian Smith:
But what percentage actually stays in country and goes into New Zealand business? Do you think it’s single digit percent, double digit percent? I know Mr. Stubbs is quite outspoken on open banking. Come on Bro, Invest in us. Help us.

Paul Spain:
Yes, there we go.

Adrian Smith:
Stop throwing stones. Invest in us.

Paul Spain:
I think they’re doing some stuff with.

Adrian Smith:
They are doing stuff. They totally are. Yeah. That’s an unfair example. You’re right.

Paul Spain:
But anyway, we do need to have a few more of these. These conversations, but just because of the timing, as we come to the end of 2024, one little topic that we should just touch on is banks starting to roll out the sort of confirmation of payee. Yes.

Adrian Smith:
I love this topic. Let’s talk about it.

Paul Spain:
This is a goodie, right? Like, this is gonna cut off at the knees some of the fraud that we. The banking fraud that we see today. And, yep, it’s taken a while to get there, but look, we’re coming into land on this one. I’m not sure is there an exact cutoff date when this has to be fully implemented. I think it’s sort of been a bit of a soft rollout, but where you won’t be able to pay someone unless you’ve got their details. What can you.

Adrian Smith:
So I haven’t been across this one specifically, but I know what we did in the UK and as part of the new payment flow. So new payments, new payees, we would then go check the name you’ve given us and the account number via an API to. To see did they match. And if it wasn’t a perfect match, if it was fuzzy logic matching, then we did more checks. But essentially, if you got the perfect match, you get these wonderful green ticks saying, yes, this is Paul Spain’s account at this bank over here. You are good and ready to go to send money there. Now, it doesn’t deal with the existing beneficiaries. You’ve got, I don’t suspect, because we couldn’t figure that out.

Adrian Smith:
That was quite hard. But for all new payments, new payees, that’s really, really helpful. And what does that do? Well, it helps mitigate the risk of what’s known as man in the middle fraud, or invoice fraud, where someone intercepts an invoice and then has your name on it and then puts my bank account number on it. And so it helps to reduce that fraud vector in terms of the percentage of fraud in New Zealand. I’d be curious to hear what others had to say. But I don’t imagine it’s the lion’s share of fraud. I think it’s more tip of the iceberg type stuff, but it’s a really good positive step. And congrats to the NZBA for bringing that in.

Adrian Smith:
And bringing it in so quickly.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And a good chunk of that is international. Right. We look at the one with Team New Zealand, I think it was maybe not the most recent campaign, but the one before, you know, where they ended up sending, was it $2.8 million in the wrong direction. But it was an international sort of transaction. So I guess for these things to go global, that’s kind of. That’s another level. And there’s only sort of so much control that can be done on that, on that front in a short space of time.

Paul Spain:
But hopefully internationally we start seeing these things line up as well.

Adrian Smith:
Yeah. So that’s the point of like the 20022 international standard, which provides a common messaging platform around the world. So New Zealand and paims, New Zealand did their implementation in April May. I don’t know how much that means for day to day New Zealanders just yet, but we have moved to that common standard. I was unaware of the Team New Zealand piece, so that’s sad to hear. But within New Zealand itself, hopefully we should see a decline in the number of times where money’s just going to people just pretending to be Paul Spain.

Paul Spain:
I’ll just throw this one in very quickly as we wrap up. I’m all for making things more simple for people. Right. So however many years ago it was when New Zealand launched the shorter domain names nz, most of our banks, most of our big organisations grab the shorter versions of their name, of course, including ASB and BNZ and so on. And they wired all that up. A couple of them, after a little bit of a nudge from me going, can I just type asb, nz? Bnz? Can I just type bnz, nz? Oh, yes, yes, we’ll fix that up now. I think that’s something. When you buy a shorter domain name, you just take care of that.

Paul Spain:
Anyway, they did it after a little nudge. Bnz though, went backwards on it. So although they own bnc, if you type that into your browser, you will get a little. A little issue that says, sorry, we couldn’t find that website 404not found. There’s a.

Adrian Smith:
Do they own the domain?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, they own the domain. And it was working for a time and then it stopped. Oh, I pinged them on Twitter probably five years years ago and they were like, oh, it’s all good. The first time I pinged them, they set it all up and it all started working. Yeah. And then obviously something changed. Maybe they weren’t, you know, they didn’t have a monitoring system that monitored that all their all their URLs were up or something.

Adrian Smith:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, have a chat to your mates or maybe, maybe, maybe some of the BNZ folks will, will listen in and, and, and, and, and tweak that one. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, but it’s just, it’s one of those things I was like, like, you know, a bank should be able to stay on top of, you know, the domain names they own.

Adrian Smith:
Okay, we’re gonna peel back the curtain now. Now, this is based on my experience in the uk. This does not speak to New Zealand, but banks aren’t always on top of when certificates and these sorts of things expire in a way that you would assume. Right? Yeah. And oftentimes the amount of times I’d be doing a change and it would break and I’m like, what the hell? And then someone be like, oh, sorry, I forgot to have the config file and turn it on. Can we try again? Like, what happens more regularly than most banks would like to admit. So I can’t speak to this particular issue. It sounds like a domain issue, but I’m very, very aware of my time in British banking that that sort of thing was more commonplace than we care to admit.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And we won’t go into any more on that one. But hey, it’s been an absolute pleasure, Adrian, delving into BlinkPay and open banking and really very, very curious how these things are gonna roll out. And yeah, wish you all the best for your endeavours working with BNZ and the other banks that you work with as well. Look, I think the upside of us as a country getting in the right place when it comes to how we really open things up and leverage technology, cross banking has got benefits for all of us, so get it done, mate.

Adrian Smith:
Well, do you know what would be super cool? We should die. Rise. Right now. Joellen, a year from now, bring me back and say, right, How’d you go, bro? How’d you get on?

Paul Spain:
Have you fixed it all?

Adrian Smith:
Have you fixed it? I think we should do that. I think we should do like a chronology, like what happened the last 12 months.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that’s good. Excellent. And of course, big thank you to our show partners, 2degrees, Spark, HP, One NZ and Gorilla Technology. All the best. Thanks, Adrian.

Adrian Smith:
Appreciate it. Thanks for your time, Paul.

Paul Spain:
Cheers. And yeah, thanks for listening in, everyone. We’ll look forward to catching you on the next episode. See ya.