Our role in money and payments
Our role in money and payments is a multi-faceted one. We oversee, operate, regulate, and supervise core payment systems. Through these systems, New Zealanders can:
- save and spend their money
- manage risks
- together grow the economy and make life better.
We also make sure businesses and banks receive the money being paid to them.
Payments are a feature of our day-to-day lives and critical to the smooth functioning of our economy.
Improving New Zealand's real-time payment capability
We are concerned that New Zealand’s banking and payments industries have fallen behind internationally in making real-time payments possible between accounts held at different banks.
This view, expanded upon below, helps drive our stakeholder engagement, monitoring, and regulatory approaches in the payments space.
New Zealanders and the New Zealand economy should benefit from modern real time account-to-account payments capability. If it is well designed, implemented and governed, it should improve the levels of innovation and competition across the payments landscape.
We will, alongside other Council of Financial Regulator (CoFR) agencies engage with industry on major design issues to deliver reliable, efficient, innovative and competition-enabling outcomes. We will also closely monitor industry progress towards real time account to account payments. As a first step, we expect industry to set out a timetable that demonstrates its commitment and progress.
CoFR vision for the future of New Zealand's payments | Council of Financial Regulators
Exchange Settlement Account System (ESAS) access review
ESAS provides real-time and irrevocable transactions between account holders. It’s used primarily by major banks and large financial institutions for high-value payments and settlement. ESAS helps ensure stability in the financial system and provides a direct way for our monetary policy decisions to influence the economy as we pay interest on ESAS balances at the overnight deposit rate.
In March 2025, we completed a comprehensive review of ESAS access that included 2 public consultations. As a result of the review, we revised the access criteria to expand eligibility to more non-bank entities.