Partnering for Payments Modernisation

Building new partnerships

The payments ecosystem is undergoing a fundamental shift, driven by rapid digital change, evolving customer expectations, and the emergence of AI‑enabled and embedded commerce models. For banks and retailers, payment modernisation is no longer a back‑office exercise, but a strategic priority tied directly to relevance, trust, and growth. Organisations that fail to adapt, risk falling behind as legacy infrastructure struggles to keep pace with new rails, methods, and experiences.

Partnering for payment modernisation explores how leading banks and retailers are responding to this disruption. Based on insights from 1,000 banking and retail executives globally, the report highlights three priorities shaping progress: building strong partner ecosystems, innovating around customer needs, and embedding agility into payment strategies, infrastructure, and operations. Leaders are no longer modernising in isolation — they are collaborating across ecosystems to accelerate innovation, reduce complexity, and unlock new sources of value.

The report serves as a call to action for organisations seeking to unlock the future of payments. By focusing on partnership‑driven modernisation, customer‑led design, and flexible, future‑ready platforms, banks and retailers can move beyond incremental change toward lasting competitive advantage in an increasingly dynamic payments landscape.

What we're seeing in Aotearoa New Zealand:

For New Zealand banks, payments modernisation has shifted from a compliance exercise to a strategic imperative that underpins growth, trust and customer experience. Local momentum is building quickly. Progress on open banking, Consumer Data Right legislation and digital identity is now being matched by tangible experimentation in real time payments and agent enabled purchasing models, and the growing industry collaboration on the future of domestic payments infrastructure. Taken together, these developments signal that innovation is no longer theoretical or years away, but actively being tested within the New Zealand market. At the same time, banks are confronting legacy platforms, cloud migration decisions, anti scam investments and the build out of APIs to enable secure data sharing and new services. These dynamics align with what we’re hearing across the market - that Aotearoa New Zealand must coordinate payments, identity and data into a cohesive, interoperable infrastructure that meets rising customer expectations.

This report’s global findings offer a practical blueprint for banks in New Zealand and around the globe to accelerate delivery. Industry leaders are forging ecosystem partnerships to move faster, making better use of richer payments data, testing tokenisation and programmable money to improve cross border efficiency, and deploying AI to strengthen fraud detection and personalise experiences. These are all capabilities that align closely with what New Zealand banks are already exploring through pilots, proofs of concept and industry led initiatives. With the right orchestration, governance and controls, payments can become a strategic lever for banks: improving straight through processing and compliance, unlocking new value added data products, and meeting customers’ demand for seamless, secure, real time interactions.

Partnering for payment modernisation

How leading banks and retailers are unlocking the future of payments

Download the report

Key findings and insights

Executive summary

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AI is really helping banks re-imagine the whole payment process and applying the technology in areas — like investigations — that have traditionally been a heavy lift for their operations teams. The hot topic now is how agentic payments are expected to transform the ecosystem, the re-imagining of payments operations, and what steps will need to be taken to help ensure it is safe, efficient and cost effective for both banks and their customers.

Courtney Trimble

Global Lead of Payments, KPMG International

Head of Payments, KPMG in the US

Banks and retailers are both working to ensure that the consumer remains loyal, so the more effectively they can work together to share data, collaborate on new technologies and deliver new options to consumers, the stickier the relationship becomes. If the banks, the service providers and the retailer can cohesively work towards the needs of the consumer and bring in personalization, the stickiness of the consumer towards all these service providers, including the retailer, increases multifold.

Puneet Mansukhani

Head of Global Retail Digital Technology and Transformation, KPMG International

Co-Lead Consumer & Retail, KPMG in India

Three key actions for banks and retailers based on the survey

Prioritise partnerships

To keep pace with rapid technological change and shifting customer expectations, banks and retailers must build dynamic ecosystems that bring together partners to accelerate modernisation and create competitive advantage.
Focus on the customer

Leading organisations start by deeply understanding customer needs and expectations, using those insights to rapidly shape and deliver payment options that are simple, relevant, and trusted.
Create agility

As the payment ecosystem continues to evolve, embedding agility into payment strategies, infrastructure, and operations is essential to enable future flexibility, scalability, and ongoing evolution.

Methodology

KPMG International surveyed 500 banks and 500 retailers between the 8 September and 30 October 2025, to assess their progress on payment modernisation, as well as their motivations, objectives, investment expectations and challenges.

Our survey asked respondents to rate their levels of progress against a range of modernisation pillars, and we used their responses to calculate their overall maturity with respondents in the top 20th percentile ranked as ‘leaders’ and those in the bottom 20th percentile ranked as ‘beginners’. In both the banking and retail sectors, the leaders tended to be those with revenues greater than US$10 billion. In the banking sector, neobanks reported the highest proportion of leaders and in the retail sector, it was e-commerce platforms that were most likely to rank as leaders.

Forty percent of retail respondents were based in Asia Pacific, 35 percent in the EMEA region and 25 percent in the Americas. The banking sample represented 36 percent of respondents from the Americas, 34 percent from the EMEA region and 31 percent from Asia Pacific.