Qippay secures NZ$5m All Roads stake, close still open
Qippay has secured a NZ$5 million All Roads commitment for 25% of its parent, but the Auckland open-banking deal was still expected to complete this week.
Having followed New Zealand open banking into regulated designation, the fact that matters in this Qippay raise is that the close is still open. Auckland fintech Qippay has secured a NZ$5 million equity commitment from Australian All Roads Wholesale Fund for a 25% stake in parent Qippay Group. Chief Executive Ashley Lake-Johns told BusinessDesk on October 12: "You can call that seed or Series A capital." The funds have been received in tranches, and the transaction was expected to complete this week. No source dated after that Monday has said the allotment is done.
The loose label is the point. A quarter of the parent, taken by an investor in mortgages and accounting rather than a venture fund, is distribution, not a tidy stage. CFOtech and Startup Daily carried the same timetable. Startup Daily also gave the sum as A$4 million and said Qippay is exploring a possible Australian expansion under Australia's Consumer Data Right (CDR). None of the three named a valuation, and this piece will not invent one from the percentage.
Lake-Johns and co-founder Wayne Deas, chief operating officer, started the firm in 2021. Qippay Limited was incorporated on July 16, 2021, and Deas is a named director. Its timeline records a 2023 bilateral with BNZ, then 2024 bilaterals with Westpac, ASB and ANZ, and the launch of Qip PayBy. The team at Auckland Council's GridAKL hub employs six full-time staff and plans to grow to about 12 to 15. Lake-Johns told CFOtech the firm "looked for the right type of investor that wouldn't necessarily mean we lose control." No cap table is published, so that claim stays his.
What the banks and rivals have not said
ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Westpac and Kiwibank had published no comment on the All Roads stake by October 14. Nor had Akahu, Wych or Volley. Under the Customer and Product Data Act 2025, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) designated ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac as data holders from December 1, 2025. Kiwibank follows for payments on June 1, 2026 and for account information on December 1, 2026. Qippay says it holds direct bilateral Application Programming Interface (API) agreements with the four major banks, and that those links are not screen-scraped and not routed overseas. The new money is not, on that account, buying the connections.
MBIE's register of participants lists Qippay Limited as an accredited requestor for banking from December 22, 2025, on a one-year term expiring at the end of December 21, 2026. The cheque lands inside an accreditation that must be renewed, the reverse of the sequence in which Brite Payments opened UK Pay by Bank after an FCA licence. It is closer to the UK big four going live on a consumer payments scheme: rails first, distribution second. Founder and Managing Director David Palmer of All Roads is to join the Qippay Group board with Lake-Johns and Deas. He told Startup Daily: "Our background across the financial spectrum includes mortgages, financial planning, tax, accounting, business advisory and so forth." He added that All Roads sees "multiple synergies" and wants "to help put Qippay on the map."
The volume is already past a pilot. Payments NZ said its API Centre would cease at the end of September 2026, with standards management moving to MBIE, and put July 2026 at more than 401,000 open-banking payments and values exceeding $130 million, with more than 221,000 customers authorising a payment or a data-sharing consent that month. July's count sits above the over 180,000 payments in the API Centre's October 2025 tally, when Phil Cass said the four major banks serve around 90% of banking customers. Moving from six people to about 12 to 15 funds a sales build, in the spirit of a bank pairing with a payments firm for small businesses, not a fight with the card networks on capital.
Qip PayBy is the one-off pay-by-bank checkout. Qip SetPay is the recurring product the company ties to a newer standard API in 2025. Lake-Johns told Startup Daily that "connecting how money moves with financial data creates opportunities that go well beyond faster, cheaper payments." Qippay also states that it is certified to ISO/IEC 27001. If completion does fall in the week described on October 12, Palmer's seat has to convert mortgage, advice and accounting relationships into volume before accreditation ends on December 21, 2026, and before Kiwibank's June 1, 2026 payments designation adds a bank outside Qippay's bilaterals. Australia stays an exploration. The Companies Office extract generated on October 14 still showed a last update of August 11, 2026, and a PitchBook profile checked that day still listed the October 12 round as in progress. Until a statement after October 12 says the shares are issued, this is a committed, tranched 25% stake not yet called complete.
Reporting by Rick Steves. Filed 14 October 2026, 16:48 GMT.
Senior Reporter, Regulation and Fintech
Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011.
