The Business of Tech

• Banking unleashed: What the new open banking regime means for consumers and fintech players

  After years of anticipation and frustration over slow progress, New Zealand’s open banking era is about to become a reality. On December 1, official regulations come into effect, bringing sweeping change to how Kiwis access and control their financial data. Akahu co-founder Josh Daniell, whose platform already integrates with more than 85 products that draw on consumers’ bank data thanks to voluntary agreements in place, joined the Business of Tech podcast to unpack what the new regime will mean for consumers, fintechs, and the banking giants themselves.​ Daniell explained the significance of the shift underway: “Over the last 20 years, there has been a buildup of consumer demand for this type of connectivity to a point where there’s more than a million Kiwis each year in New Zealand using unregulated, open banking methods,” he told me. The old model was a messy patchwork – screen-scraping bots, voluntary deals, and inconsistent application programming interfaces (APIs) that left customers with little transparency or control. “Consumers didn’t have full control of how those connections worked,” Daniell said, “and any product that wants those kind of data feeds, either has to go and get a contract with each bank, or do it in a way that isn’t sanctioned by the bank”.​ Encouraging the mavericks Under the new regulatory system, a product provider or intermediary like Akahu can become accredited and access secure, standardised APIs from any major bank, a move Daniell believes will “put the consumer more in the driving seat” and sweep away the old system’s uncertainty. This reform is not just about convenience. It is intended to foster greater competition and innovation. “If there was a challenger in the banking sector…they can make it simple for people to connect their external accounts and then switch across to those better products,” Daniell explained. The Commerce Commission’s recent market study recommended open banking precisely for this reason – to unlock bottlenecks and foster a more vibrant sector.​ But New Zealand’s adoption of an official open banking regime is well behind other countries, such as Australia and the United Kingdom, where uptake of open banking services has been limited. Daniell is upbeat about the New Zealand system’s design. Lessons from the Aussies and Brits “We think MBIE really learned from those regimes that have gone in front of us, and we think the regulation is well designed. It’s simple, it sets out a data sharing system, and it doesn’t try to move into things like data protection, which is left to the Privacy Act,” he said. He argues New Zealand’s system is more streamlined than Australia’s, which “over-engineered some aspects…and as a result, some organisations haven’t actually transitioned”.​ On launch day, the Big Four banks, ANZ, ASB, BNZ, and Westpac, will be designated as official data holders, required to offer open banking APIs to any accredited party. “It turns it from a voluntary offering…to a mandatory offering,” Daniell said, “and it also means that you don’t need a contract with each bank. You become accredited centrally, and then you have access to all regulated APIs in that system”.​ Payment innovation is another headline benefit. Daniell points to future use cases, such as convenient bank-to-bank payments, app-to-app transactions, and avoiding credit card fees. “With open banking, you can essentially put your bank account on file, like putting a card on file, so you can have exactly the same experience. You leave the Uber, and you’re paying via a bank payment rather than a card payment. And the benefit here is a cost one. It’s just cheaper to process an account-to-account payment than it is to process that same payment over the card network”. Trust and value will rule​ Concerns about privacy and security remain, but Daniell is clear that trust and value will always be central for consumers. “People absolutely need to consider the party that they’re dealing with and decide whether they trust them with sensitive data. Regulated open banking doesn’t change the decision they need to make there,” he says. Accredited companies face strict requirements – insurance, fit and proper tests, and security obligations – but consumers must weigh “how much value they’re going to get from sharing their data”.​ Looking ahead, Daniell is bullish about rapid adoption as the voluntary phase ends: “I would like to think that we have hundreds of thousands of Kiwis using the regulated open banking system before the end of next year…within three years, I’ll be disappointed if we don’t have a million Kiwis having used it. I think that’s viable, given all of the unregulated use of open banking that currently exists”.​ Listen to the full conversation with Josh Daniell in the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, streaming on iHeartRadio and wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list Xero founder Rod Drury funds secure-messaging startup Corro - BusinessDesk Rocket Lab delays Neutron rocket launch but shares jump - BusinessDesk Dutch carbon tech startup Skytree plans to put down roots in NZ - BusinessDesk So far so good for NZ’s space station mission - BusinessDesk After three days of blunders, Microsoft finally delivers on 365 refund – but some of the fine print still annoys - NZ Herald Inside the data centres that train AI and drain the electrical grid - New Yorker Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show - Reuters Anthropic Is on Track to Turn a Profit Much Faster Than OpenAI - Wall Street Journal The next iPhone Air has reportedly been delayed - The Verge Apple TV execs dismiss introducing an ad tier, buying Warner Bros. Discovery - Ars TechnicaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• Oppo’s bid to crack NZ’s smartphone duopoly

  Chinese smartphone maker Oppo is making an assertive play to shake up the $1.3 billion smartphone market in New Zealand, aiming to disrupt the long-standing duopoly of Samsung and Apple with a mix of tech innovation and brand-building efforts. In this week’s episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Oppo New Zealand Managing Director Morgan Halim shares insights on how the challenger brand, which claims around 10% of the local market, is reimagining what Kiwi consumers can expect from their devices.​ Taking on a cosy duopoly “We started about seven years ago, and we knew there was a gap in the market when there were only two players in New Zealand,” Halim told me. “Over time, we just built that brand awareness. That helped us in terms of people getting to know who we are, and slowly, they… understand and see our point of difference in the market,” he said.​ Halim is candid about the challenge of breaking entrenched brand loyalty, particularly among Apple devotees wary of switching from iOS to Android. “That’s the tough thing to crack, isn’t it? So building that brand loyalty and just awareness of it, it took a while for Oppo,” he noted.​ Embedding in local culture The Shenzhen-based smartphone maker’s approach has not just been about technology but embedding the brand into Kiwi life. Halim highlighted major sports partnerships, especially via football sponsorships, as important to raising brand awareness. “From day one in New Zealand, [our strategy has been] how do we show the customer we are a global company, but also local? Wellington Phoenix is a good example. They have been a great partner for us to have that resonance closer to the New Zealand customer.”​ Oppo’s association with New Zealand football was extended in September when it signed a two-year agreement to become the official smartphone and smart device partner of the All Whites and the Ford Football Ferns. Innovation at every price point Oppo’s handset range stretches from entry-level A-series smartphones, through the Reno series, to its flagship Find X9 Pro, which was launched in Barcelona last month, and which Halim says exemplifies Oppo’s drive to push boundaries. “What is Find X for us? We focus on display quality, charging speed and camera innovation. And we partner up with Hasselblad, positioning the Find X as the premium photography tool,” he said.​ One of the Find X9 Pro’s standout features is its formidable battery life, made possible by cutting-edge chipset and battery tech. “We put a 7500 mAh (milliamp hour) battery on the Find X9 Pro, and it's probably one of the biggest batteries out there in the New Zealand market. If you’re a power user, it will last you a day – that’s guaranteed for sure. If you’re not a power user… we can see that extended more than a day or longer.”​ A thoughtful approach to AI Oppo is betting big on AI, not as a gimmick, but as a core part of the user experience. “About two years ago, we knew that AI was coming. [We’ve] come up with three major domains: AI productivity, AI creativity, and AI imaging… but the idea is, how do we move from a single AI feature to a system-level approach where it’s more than AI woven into the experience,” Halim explained.​ A key new feature debuting in the Find X9 series is AI Mindspace, which with the press of the “snap” button on the side of the phone or swipe of the screen, the contents displayed on the screen will be analysed by AI, a record and summary of the contents kept for quick access. For more intensive productivity tasks, Oppo has partnered with Google Gemini for AI capabilities. Oppo’s focus is on the mobile ecosystem and openness,” Halim says. “Rather than trying to have a closed ecosystem...our headphones, whether you are using Android devices from different brands or an iPhone, you can use the full functions. We’re doing the same with our wearables as well, whatever ecosystem you’re using.”​ The long game Halim is optimistic about the future, despite lingering retail headwinds in 2025. “We had an amazing Q1 with double-digit growth year on year, but Q2 and Q3...those buffers slowly disappeared. “Consumer confidence is still pretty low at the moment, [though] there’s action happening, and you will see income a little more available. So yeah, I’m still quite hopeful for Q4, especially Black Friday and Christmas.”​ Listen to the full conversation with Morgan Halim on The Business of Tech podcast, available on BusinessDesk, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list Oppo Find X9 Pro first look: The moment Oppo grows up - BusinessDesk Westpac NZ takes aim at Google and Meta’s efforts to fight financial crime - BusinessDesk Kordia sells its managed IT services business - BusinessDesk RBNZ stress test shows banks resilient to IT failure and global shocks - BusinessDesk Being AI’s last stand: Company to sell final asset, vows to stay listed - BusinessDesk Experts find flaws in hundreds of tests that check AI safety and effectiveness | Artificial intelligence - The Guardian OpenAI Successfully Sheds Its Roots as an Ethical Non-Profit - Futurism Spotify Beats on Users, Sales as Daniel Ek Prepares for Exit - Bloomberg How new biometric privacy rules will change what businesses must disclose - NZ Herald 48 Hours Without AI: How wired have we really become? - New York TimesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• Rocket Lab at 20: From pipe dream to $50 billion space empire

  Rocket Lab is on the brink of turning 20 – and what began as one man’s dream in an Invercargill garage is now a Nasdaq-listed global space business valued at over NZ$50 billion. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, Sir Peter Beck joins me from Rocket Lab’s headquarters in Long Beach, California, to reflect on the company’s remarkable two decades of innovation and persistence – and how Rocket Lab continues to push the limits of what’s possible. A new book The Launch of Rocket Lab, which I authored, was released this week and captures that journey – from those early days in the corner of Industrial Research Ltd. in Auckland, to a highlight reel of 75 orbital missions. But the creation of Rocket Lab was actually fuelled by disillusionment. A visit to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in early 2006 convinced Beck that his dream of working for those bastions of aerospace innovation would never become a reality. It wasn’t just that the self-taught engineer from New Zealand didn’t have the credentials to land a job there. He wasn’t overly impressed at what he saw. On the flight back to New Zealand, he took a napkin and started writing up his plans for his own rocket company. Lean, fast, and fearless Three years later, he achieved success with Ātea-1, the small sounding rocket launched from Great Mercury Island in 2009 that proved Rocket Lab could build and fly a vehicle on a shoestring budget. “It was relief more than anything,” Beck admits. “We’d worked so hard to get to that moment. You can test as much as you can, but you’re never sure of the outcome. That first launch gave us credibility to come to the States and start doing real work,” he told me. That mindset – lean, fast, and fearless – has remained a constant. “When you start from nothing, and you have no resources, you never forget that,” Beck said. “It’s hard to get lazy or rich and happy when everyone’s always on the bleeding edge, making sure we extract the most from the minimum amount of capital.” That culture has fuelled two decades of technical firsts. Rocket Lab was the first company to put a carbon-composite rocket in orbit, the first to use electric turbopumps, and the first to reach space with a 3D‑printed engine. “Those things are now standard practice,” Beck said, “but back then, we were certainly leaning forward on the technology.” Launch Complex 1 - still going strong Mahia Peninsula, where Rocket Lab’s private launch site was built, remains central to that story – and close to Beck’s heart. “It’s the best launch site in the world, hands down. For so many reasons. One, it’s the most beautiful, and two, we get more inclination options than anywhere else,” he explained. The relationship with local landowners and communities began, appropriately for Rocket Lab, in low-key fashion. “We met the chiefs of the trust who owned the land at a doughnut shop,” Beck said. “It’s great to be part of that community.” While the Electron rocket, which debuted in 2017, put Rocket Lab on the map, missions like CAPSTONE – which sent a small NASA satellite on a slingshot path to the Moon – showed how far the company’s ambition extended. “It was an engineering marvel,” Beck said. “We used a tiny rocket and an even smaller spacecraft, measured everything down to the gram, and pulled off something everyone thought could only be done with a big rocket.” Neutron’s disruptive potential Now attention is turning to Neutron, Rocket Lab’s medium-lift reusable rocket designed to compete head-on with SpaceX, which Beck is preparing for launch, potentially before the end of the year. “There’s one dominant player in medium-class launch, and having competition is important,” Beck said. “Neutron looks different from any rocket that’s ever been built. That’s because we had the luxury of a clean sheet – applying everything we learned from Electron.” As Rocket Lab heads into its third decade, Beck is thinking not just about rockets but about New Zealand’s place in the trillion‑dollar global space economy. “Depending on whose report you read, it’ll be between US$1.4 and $2  trillion by 2035,” he said. “There’s no reason New Zealand can’t have a bigger slice. It’s my job to make sure we get the biggest piece of that pie possible.” Listen to the full episode of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees Business, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list Health NZ's HealthX AI trial cuts after-hours admin by up to 81% - BusinessDesk Blacks or brilliance? 2025 TVs force buyers to pick their perfect picture - BusinessDesk Don't get stuck in Big Tech's AI ecosystem, Amanda Johnstone warns - BusinessDesk IT Professionals NZ members vote for liquidation as more red ink revealed, reboot takes shape - NZ Herald OpenAI releases first web browser, Atlas – with Kiwi Ben Goodger at spearhead - NZ Herald AI is using your data to set personalised prices online. It could seriously backfire - The Conversation Generative AI is a societal disaster - Paris Marx Amazon’s AWS outage caused internet-enabled mattresses to malfunction - The Washington Post - Washington Post Amazon to Cut 14,000 Jobs Across Corporate Workforce - Bloomberg Meta and TikTok to obey Australia under-16 social media ban - AFPSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• From pilot to payoff: “Five times return on our AI investment”

  It’s been a year since AI agents burst onto the tech scene, driven largely by the vision and product roadmap of Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who is betting the company’s future on the “agentic enterprise”. Saleforce’s Agentforce platform, which allows customers to build and deploy agents in days or weeks, automating aspects of sales, customer service, marketing, and even software development, has racked up 12,000 customers in its first year. But Benioff said last week in San Francisco that there’s a gap between the innovation AI companies are progressing, and the business sector’s ability to adopt AI at scale. The halls of the Moscone Centre in San Francisco were full last week of early adopters, companies that have deployed AI agents with promising results, from PepsiCo, to Lululemon. Among them was One NZ, the telco that has spent years modernising its tech platforms and which uses Salesforce for its customer relationship management. "Already across our AI investment, five times return," One NZ CEO Jason Paris told me on this week’s episode of The Business of Tech, describing how One NZ deployed an agentic tool to help prepaid customers migrate to better mobile plans. “We've been deploying AI and all the variations of it, so robotic process automation or machine learning, for over 10 years. We've only been deploying agentic for last year, because no one even really knew about it 12 months ago,” he said. “But yeah, five times ROI on our AI investment. So a lot of people are saying, is the value there? We can see the value. Absolutely. And we think this is just the beginning. We want more.” Orchestrating multiple agents The agent authenticates customers, presents personalised plan options, explains trade-offs, and completes the entire transaction autonomously via chatbot – all in a matter of minutes.​ Previously, a customer may have needed to make a phone call to the One NZ contact centre or visit a store to achieve the same outcome. Paris added that the newly deployed Agentforce agent has delivered a 400% improvement in customer engagement compared to traditional digital journeys.​ "It took us five weeks to build and deploy," Paris explained, noting that the first agent One NZ built with Salesforce took just eight hours to create, though two additional weeks were needed for data integration and cleanup.​ Sitting behind that simple chatbot designed to help prepaid mobile customers find a new plan, are actually seven AI agents working together. "We're in this age now where this one agent can orchestrate multiple actions,” said Hamish Miles, Salesforce New Zealand’s managing director. “In [One NZ’s case] it's like… a security check in for the trust layer. It's, have we got the right plan? Can I make some recommendations? We can do so much more as well." Miles acknowledged that addressing Benioff's innovation-adoption gap requires overcoming hesitation. "I think there's probably a little bit of reluctance to make a start," he said, noting that companies often worry about data quality. His advice is to at least get going on creating AI agents. "Make a start, because it's a low-risk entry. Is the agent going to be perfect straight away? No, it won't be. But will it learn? Yes, it will. Can we make corrections very quickly? Yes, it will. So start experimenting," he said. Salesforce itself now runs more than 200 internal agents managing 550 different tasks.​ Mark Benioff says use of AI agents is saving the company $100 million annually, much of it in customer support costs, including reduced headcount. Voice - the next frontier in AI agents The next frontier for AI agents is voice. Paris described the upcoming product Agentforce Voice, which enables natural conversations with AI agents over the phone, as "a game changer" and "probably, of all the things that were discussed, personally, [what] I'm most excited about". With up to 80% of customer service interactions in some industries still coming via phone, voice-enabled agents could fundamentally transform customer experience.​ "If I can have a conversation where there's no latency, it's a humanised conversation that you can build rapport through transparency that you're talking to an agentic tool, it's probably an easier step for me to just talk to an AI agent in the same way I would talk to an agent in a call centre," Paris explained.​ As New Zealand's economy continues to face headwinds, the ability to simultaneously reduce costs and increase productivity through agentic AI presents a compelling opportunity, but many businesses still need to get their data and IT infrastructure in place to deploy AI agents effectively. AI expertise is also thin in our organisations. "Leadership needs to come from the top,” said Miles. “If you look at any successful transformation project over the last 10 to 20 years in technology, the one core ingredient that it got right was governance and leadership, and it came from the top." Listen to the full episode of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees Business, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list NZ might have gone cloud-first, but public sector IT is still stuck on the ground: report - BusinessDesk The tech is real. The hype could ruin it - BusinessDesk Canva cash and human capital sprinkling Kiwi startups - BusinessDesk London Became a Global Hub for Phone Theft. Now We Know Why - Slashdot Please stop putting Peter's phone number on your accounts - Information Age ‘I left Microsoft to get my hands dirty’: Telstra’s $1.6b bid for AI riches - Australian Financial Review The Web Is Becoming AI’s Interface Layer - Richard MacManus OpenAI’s AI-powered browser, ChatGPT Atlas, is here - The Verge Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots - New York Times Netflix goes ‘all in’ on generative AI as entertainment industry remains divided - Tech CrunchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• Steady hands, not knee-jerk bans: Brainbox’s approach to AI regulation

  The call for dedicated regulations governing artificial intelligence has grown louder as the technology’s power to disrupt industries and society becomes ever more apparent. But this week’s guest on The Business of Tech podcast, Brainbox Institute director and co-founder Tom Barraclough, warns against rushing into bespoke artificial intelligence regulation. He instead argues that the country is best served by leveraging and coordinating its existing legal framework. “It’s not a binary exercise,” Barraclough stressed. “Even if you take the most strident approach to regulating artificial intelligence, and that is really the European Union approach, what you find is the top-level legislation can be quite general. It’s not like we’re just going to say, let’s regulate AI and then tomorrow AI will be regulated.”​ AI Act - no easy fix The European Union’s AI Act takes a risk-based approach to regulating AI services, requiring scrutiny and oversight of them in proportion to their potential to do harm, with an outright ban for some AI-powered uses, such as social credit scoring systems. But in reality, a complex series of codes of practice, self-regulation, regulatory instruments and legislation makes up the EU’s regulatory regime. Many of those provisions exist in our own laws and could be applied to AI – if we better understood what is available. New Zealand shouldn’t see existing legislation as obsolete, Barraclough told me. “Fraud through deepfakes is already a criminal offence. The other example of this is non-consensual sexual imagery as well… covered by the Harmful Digital Communications Act and the Crimes Act,” he pointed out.​ Biometrics Code as a model “From a kind of starting point, it’s much more grey in terms of what we already have in place and how we use that more effectively. Even if we did decide to just really kick things off and go hard, it would still be a pretty long process of trying to work out what regulatory stuff means.” Barraclough suggests that clarification is needed more than new legislation, something Parliament could play a more proactive role in by updating existing laws. He also points to initiatives like the Biometrics Processing Privacy Code 2025 developed by the Privacy Commissioner as examples of models that can be rapidly adapted or incorporated into AI policy. “If you can demonstrate that you’ve got a code that works, it’s much, much easier for an agency to just pick that up and give it some teeth if it works well,” he said.​ New Zealand’s competitive edge: Smart deployment and sovereign AI Barraclough does see a vital need for a national vision for AI. “I probably would have advocated for what’s called a human rights-based approach, but that kind of framing has fallen out of favor internationally,” he pointed out. Sovereign AI, where New Zealanders have a level of autonomy over the infrastructure supplying AI services rather than relying on offshore tech platforms plays into his thinking.​ “This isn’t about having a NZ GPT that’s trained on like all of the data in New Zealand and speaks with a Kiwi accent. [Sovereign AI] can be as simple as talking about meaningful AI literacy, or making sure that we do have resilient digital infrastructure for access and deployment of AI systems. In all likelihood, it probably means fine-tuning models that already exist,” he said.​ New Zealand’s competitive advantage lies in “being the world’s smartest deployers of AI systems” Barraclough argues. That acknowledges that while we may not, as a nation, have the resources to build our own large language models, with smart regulation and a collaborative approach, we can deploy innovative AI systems that can transform digital services and win offshore business in the process. Listen to episode 121 of The Business of Tech, powered by 2degrees Business for my in-depth interview with Tom Barraclough, streaming on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. Your weekly tech reading list Gigged out: meet your new digital co-workers - BusinessDesk Dispute Buddy startup makes its case for ‘justice tech’ - BusinessDesk Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7: Slimmer, sharper, and (almost) ready for prime time - BusinessDesk Latest capital raise values Sharesies at $750m - BusinessDesk It’s Sam Altman: the man who stole the rights from copyright. If he’s the future, can we go backwards? - The Guardian Tesla faces Australian class action suit - news.com.au AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought - Futurism DOJ seizes $15 billion in bitcoin from massive ‘pig butchering’ scam based in Cambodia - CNBC Researchers used $800 of off-the-shelf hardware to collect data sent by satellites unencrypted, like T-Mobile users' calls and texts and some US military comms - Wired Salesforce expands its OpenAI and Anthropic partnerships to embed their LLMs into Agentforce 360, letting users access Agentforce 360 apps in ChatGPT, and more - Constellation Research See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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