Platform overview¶
Strategic directions¶
The platform is being built to serve two complementary commercial strategies from a single technology foundation.
Track 1 — Direct digital bank A digital-first bank licensed and operating in New Zealand and Australia under its own regulatory authorisations. No branches. No legacy systems. Retail customers open accounts, transact, save, borrow, and manage finances entirely through the app.
Track 2 — SaaS for financial institutions The same modular platform licensed as single-tenant SaaS to building societies, mutual banks, and regional banks that already hold their own licences. Institutions deploy selected modules under their own brand. They keep their customer relationships, their regulatory standing, and their identity — the platform provides the infrastructure they cannot economically build themselves.
These strategies are more complementary than competing. The direct bank proves the platform under live regulatory conditions. The SaaS track monetises that investment by serving institutions that face the same technology modernisation problem without the capital or engineering capability to solve it internally.
See market opportunity for market data, competitive landscape, and indicative pricing.
Who it is for¶
Track 1 — Retail customers Digital-native individuals with financial relationships in New Zealand and/or Australia. Primary differentiator: seamless NZD ↔ AUD cross-border experience — instant transfers, transparent FX, unified dashboard.
Track 2 — Licensed financial institutions Building societies, mutual banks, credit unions, and regional banks operating in NZ or AU (pilot), expanding to other markets from Year 3. Institutions with existing customer bases, strong local brands, and banking licences — but ageing core systems and limited technology investment capacity.
What makes it different¶
- NZD ↔ AUD seamless wallet — instant cross-border transfers between the customer's own accounts, transparent FX spread, same-day settlement
- Real-time ledger — interest accrual visible daily, balances always current, no batch processing delays
- AI-powered financial companion — proactive insights, idle cash detection, pre-approved credit, spend anomaly alerts
- One app for everything — single codebase serves customer and back office staff; role determines what is shown
- Compliance as code — every policy obligation satisfied by a system module; the audit trail is the system log
- Modular single-tenant SaaS — institutions select the modules they need, deploy under their own brand, pay per customer per month; no shared infrastructure
The platform in one paragraph¶
Neon serverless Postgres is the operational store — the source of truth for every ledger entry, account, customer record, and payment. A Lambda CDC pipeline carries all change events to Snowflake via Kinesis Firehose and S3 Apache Iceberg. Amazon EventBridge routes domain events between Lambda functions. Snowflake is the analytics, risk, and regulatory compute platform — capital ratios, AML models, fraud scoring, categorisation, and all regulatory reports run here. Results write back to Postgres for operational use. A single React/Next.js application serves all user surfaces — customer mobile and back office — with role-based mode switching. Every API call goes through HTTP API Gateway. All secrets vaulted. No standing production access.
Markets and jurisdictions¶
| Jurisdiction | Regulator | Supervision |
|---|---|---|
| New Zealand | RBNZ, FMA | Bank registration, AML/CFT, conduct |
| Australia | APRA, ASIC, AUSTRAC | ADI authorisation, consumer credit, AML/CTF |
Dual-jurisdiction obligations handled natively. Data residency enforced per jurisdiction. Customers may hold accounts in both markets under a single KYC record.
For Track 2: NZ pilot in Year 1. AU expansion Year 2. Further markets (Pacific, Southeast Asia, UK) from Year 3.
Current status¶
See status.md for live build progress.
Where to go next¶
| I want to understand... | Go to |
|---|---|
| Market opportunity and SaaS pricing model | market-opportunity.md |
| The business and system goals | ../goals/business-goals.md |
| The technical architecture | ../architecture/platform-overview.md |
| The regulatory framework | ../governance/index.md |
| All business domains | ../domains/index.md |
| All systems and modules | ../systems/index.md |
| Architecture decisions | ../architecture/decisions/index.md |
| All repos and ownership | ecosystem-map.md |