BNZ to provide Confirmation of Payee to customers in November

BNZ will be one of the first New Zealand banks to provide Confirmation of Payee when it rolls out the service at the end of November.

“At BNZ we’re continuously looking for new ways to help protect customers from scammers,” says BNZ CEO Dan Huggins.

“We’re pleased to be able to deliver Confirmation of Payee as quickly as possible after it becomes available in New Zealand, adding it to the suite of tools to help our customers be safer online.”

BNZ’s other recent anti-scam features include:
• An ‘online banking lock’ feature in the BNZ banking app which allows customers to disable all internet banking and BNZ mobile app activity and lock access to their accounts if they suspect a scammer has gained access to their online accounts.
• Additional two-factor authentication (2FA) within internet banking for high-risk actions such as changing personal contact details, creating a new payee, editing an existing payee, or making payments to unsaved payees. This is required regardless of whether a customer has already completed 2FA in their current session.

Confirmation of Payee will provide BNZ customers with an extra level of assurance when making payments from one bank account to another within New Zealand.

It will help customers be confident that they are paying who they think they are before the payment is made, which will help reduce payment errors and stop some instances of scams and fraud.

From next week, BNZ will start contacting customers to let them know Confirmation of Payee is coming, what it is and how it will work.

“BNZ invests tens of millions of dollars in scam, fraud and anti-money laundering protection each year. As always, we encourage our customers to get in touch with us straight away if they think they may be being scammed,” says Huggins.