Banking on Change: APIs, Lessons, and the Road Ahead

Episode #: S01E03
Hosts: Adrian Smith (CEO, BlinkPay) & Tim D’Shea (Head of Product, BlinkPay)
Guest: Jonathan Dale from the Bank of New Zealand

Music by Levgen Poltavskyi from Pixabay

 

Episode Overview
Open banking in Aotearoa is gathering momentum — but what does it really take to modernise decades of legacy systems, stay compliant with fast-evolving regulation, and still deliver innovation that customers trust?

In this episode, we sit down with Jonathan Dale (BNZ) to unpack the realities of building open banking at scale. Together with Adrian and Tim from BlinkPay, they explore what’s working, what’s slowing things down, and what success could look like when New Zealand reaches full ecosystem maturity.

In this kōrero we cover:

• 📈 UK adoption milestone: what 15 million UK users can teach us — and why NZ may be moving even faster.
• 🏛️ ComCom’s open letter: regulation as an accelerant (and sometimes a handbrake).
• 🔒 Trust & fraud: why banks and fintechs alike need to go beyond “safe enough” to truly win customer confidence.
• 🏗️ Behind the APIs: the real lessons BNZ have learned about scalability, resilience, and security.
• 🤝 Collaboration: how banks and fintechs are shaping standards together — and why partnerships matter.
• 🌏 Looking ahead: the customer experiences that excite the most, from seamless recurring payments to new data-driven services.

Why tune in?
This isn’t about theory — it’s about the lived reality of building open banking in Aotearoa. If you’re a fintech, regulator, banker, or just curious about how APIs are reshaping finance, you’ll get candid insights, lessons learned, and a glimpse of the road ahead.