The Point 2022

Pre-conference Drinks

Day 1 speakers

Day 1 networking

Gala Dinner

Here are our top insights from day 1 of The Point 2022, in no particular order.

It’s becoming harder and harder to figure out who we can trust

Trust is really an issue of integrity, and that comes down to believing that an institution or entity’s interests are aligned with your own best interests, according to UK author and leading expert on trust in the modern world, Rachel Botsman. In her keynote presentation, she talked about the world being currently in the midst of the third biggest trust shift in human history, most recently moving from an institutional model to a distributed one. This has been caused by major technological disruption and it has impacted who people choose to give their trust to, for example, trusting in social media sources rather than traditional news media.

In the payments innovation panel, Mark Colley, Senior Manager at Red Bird Ventures said the next generation has a really different view of trust. So businesses need think about what and who they might choose to trust. Our assumption is that younger generations are giving up their personal data easily and for nothing. However, that’s not necessarily true in financial services as there’s something fundamentally different about who you trust with your money, said Mark.

The trust pause and the trust leap

Trust leaps happen when you ask someone to take a risk or do something differently by asking them to move from the known, safe, and familiar into the unknown, said trust expert Rachel. Between those two states is a big sea of uncertainty. Speed can be the enemy of trust, and sometimes introducing a ‘trust pause’ can help people give their trust to the right people, she said. Our Chief Executive Steve Wiggins said the payments industry are familiar with the idea of trust pauses, they just call them adding friction back into the process.

In the world of finance, people are being asked to leap higher and faster than ever before, said Rachel. Ultimately, trust is highly subjective and personal. A good start for organisations struggling with the issue of customer trust is to take time to understand what trust state their customers are in before introducing them to new systems and technologies.

The carbon coin – the currency of the future?

In an amusing joint session, UK author and financial services commentator Dave Birch and futurist and author Brett King from the US, took on the challenge of trying to figure out how people might pay in the future. Dave spoke about how science didn’t predict credit cards, art did. So, the answer to the right payments solution for generations to come could lie in popular sci-fi. He saw the role of cash as being post-functional and limited to ceremonial purposes.

Brett speculated that due to the climate change crisis and the potential mobilisation of assets around the world to mitigate climate change, there was quite a strong possibility that a global carbon coin could become reality. A carbon coin could incentivise people to do things like carbon capture, which would help with climate efforts.

There’s a ‘revived’ buzzword in town – co-opetition

Mark from Redbird Ventures said the key word is co-opetition (an amalgam of competition and cooperation), and it’s the key to having more innovation that benefits consumers. The industry needs to pull together initially to create the market, and then fight to get a slice of the pie later. They also need to figure out what will work for all parties involved. Partnerships should be strategic to both fintechs and the banks, and fintechs on their part should also make sure they’re “bank-ready”.

In his session on the future of payments infrastructure, Aman Cheema, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Global Real Time Payments from FIS said while it’s all well and good for banks to compete with each other, the payments industry also needs to compete with each other, such as in what payment types they can offer. Customers want choice, but equally merchants also want choice about what rails they can use, from debit cards to open banking rails.

As an industry, we’ve got the power

Our Chief Executive Steve Wiggins wrapped up the day by saying as a payments industry, we can demonstrate leadership and make those changes to systems and processes for the greater good. Innovation is great, so let’s do it together, he said.

Aman Cheema from FIS said the payments community globally needs to keep up with the pace of change. Regulators and central banks are doing what they need to do to ensure payment systems remain efficient, safe, secure, stable, and resilient. For the industry, having more competition across the whole payment stack is a good thing and competition is one of the key components to driving innovation.

Here's a look at the new developments and trends in Aotearoa New Zealand that were covered during the deep dive online sessions.

Kiwi consumer insights and payment trends

Anna Perera-Shaw, Director – Consumer Credit, Deposits & Payments, RFI Global, provided an update on payment trends in a changing landscape and discussed how consumer payment methods and sentiment have changed over time in Aotearoa.

From their research, Anna noted that Kiwi consumers are currently concerned with inflation and the rising cost of living, and less than 50% of consumers in Aotearoa agree that they are at an “optimal level of financial wellness”. She also showed that usage of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services continue to increase in Aotearoa, as well as the use of contactless and mobile payments. Kiwi consumers have indicated a growing expectation that contactless payment methods will be available in most stores.

Aotearoa’s open banking future

Open banking was a hot topic on day 2 especially with Minister Clark announcing in the morning that banking would be the first sector to be designated under Aotearoa’s Consumer Data Right (CDR) framework.

In the open banking session, our API Centre Manager Phil Cass shared how the API Centre is leading Aotearoa’s open banking future by creating the framework that will ensure fast, secure, user-friendly data sharing. He said the API Centre’s business and technical working groups have been pivotal in developing this framework, where people have contributed over 100,000 hours of time to date to create the building blocks we now have.

Phil highlighted that we are starting to see a growing number of partnerships and products and services using the centre’s standards come to market. He also talked about some of the steps the API Centre is taking to facilitate our API Standards Users to enter into partnerships more easily, including the soon-to-be launched at the time (now available) due diligence service.

During the panel discussion which followed Phil’s presentation, the panellists discussed the opportunities the Consumer Data Right (CDR) could create to accelerate open banking in Aotearoa and “unlock value for consumers”.

Payments NZ and the API Centre have long been supportive of having a fit-for-purpose consumer data right framework in Aotearoa and we’re eager to work closely with the Minister, other government officials, our industry, and the business community to implement this new legislation.

Dr Scott Farrell, who led the review for the Australian government on Open Banking in 2017 and the Inquiry into the Future Directions of the Consumer Data Right in 2020, joined us later in the afternoon to share what lessons he thought Aotearoa could learn from Australia when it came to open banking.

“Information security is not an issue that belongs to one country. Data and data attacks don’t recognise borders,” he said. One of the benefits of this shared issue is that different countries are able to see, and use, what others have created and constantly improve.

Dr Farrell expressed his delight at Minister Clark’s announcement on open banking as the development of a CDR framework in Aotearoa will provide learnings for Australia, and the rest of the world, when they update their regimes.

Payments for the next generation

In his opening address on day 1 of the conference, our Chief Executive Steve Wiggins highlighted that “a modern, adaptable real-time infrastructure has the potential to deliver a resilient, open and inclusive payments landscape for the benefit of all in Aotearoa”.

The underlying systems to deliver real-time capability can also act as a next generation payments platform, able to deliver a host of other benefits such as rich data, API connectivity, and features such as request to pay and payee confirmation.

In our day 2 online session ‘Reframing our real-time future – payments for the next generation’, our guest speaker Geoff Tunbridge, VP & Head of SaaS, International Markets, ACI Worldwide said that the ultimate success of open banking relies on having real-time payments. "Open banking is real-time; APIs are real-time. Therefore there is an expectation that the whole value chain you’re doing through the open banking experience becomes real-time.”

In this session, the Payments NZ real-time team talked about the release of our new discussion document, ‘Payments for the next generation: real-time in Aotearoa New Zealand’, which is the start to a dialogue with the industry about what the ideal real-time capability for Aotearoa could look like.

If you’d like to get a copy of the discussion document, and get involved in these important conversations, then register now on our website and we’ll email it to you.

Mobile wallets, data security, the metaverse, global conflicts and everything in between

Following their entertaining sci-fi inspired joint presentation on day 1, Brett King, Futurist, Author and Founder of Moven from the US, and David Birch, author, advisor and commentator on digital financial services from the UK, ran individual online sessions on day 2.

Brett’s topic was ‘The future of payments and everything’. He took us on a tour of the global payments future, looking at mobile wallets, the metaverse, China’s digital currency, the e-CNY and its Belt and Road Initiative, AI developments, climate change adaptation and global conflicts.

One of Brett’s key points was that wallets that enable machines to hold assets and allow machines to transact will be one of the core technologies used to create sustainable systems, ultimately improving the future of humanity.

Dave’s session ‘Tap to prove’, looked at the use of new technologies to improve security in the mass market, including password authentication and self-sovereign identity. He said an interesting distinction in self-sovereign identity is the idea that systems will be authorising, not identifying. In this context, the need to know that a user is in fact a person is the most important credential of all.

Dave also said that to move digital ID forward, we need to get used to the idea of ‘ceremony’ by making security and privacy part of every transaction.