As New Zealand's central bank, the RBNZ is charged with maintaining price stability, regulating financial institutions, managing inflation and safeguarding the integrity of the financial system.
It operates the Exchange Settlement Account System (ESAS) and NZClear which together underpin the stability of New Zealand’s banking and financial markets infrastructure. Every improvement strengthens the operation of the country’s economy.
ESAS is New Zealand’s principal high‑value payments and settlement system, used by banks and other approved institutions to provide real‑time gross settlement (RTGS) for payments. Last year it handled an average of NZD 29.8 billion in daily transactions, with every transaction legally final and irrevocable the moment it settles.
NZClear, meanwhile, holds NZD 454 billion in financial securities making it the backbone for clearing and settlement in both domestic and international markets. Together, these systems form an operational environment that requires continuous uptime and robust disaster recovery capabilities.
Given the critical nature of ESAS and NZClear, RBNZ requires a near-perfect threshold for uptime, high resiliency and the ability to perform upgrades and maintenance without disrupting operations.
In 2021 RBNZ’s Financial Market Infrastructures and Settlements (FMI&S) Directorate engaged Datacom to provide long‑term infrastructure support through a dedicated outsourced Agile team.
Agile saw the end of the traditional waterfall project delivery model with Statement of Works (SoWs) which created commercial overhead and delayed project execution to deliver improvements. With the Agile approach RBNZ can be more responsive to its business priorities and deliver systems changes and improvements faster, with the same process rigour.
Datacom’s Agile team structure provided:
This approach was collaborative and transparent, with scope controlled directly by the Reserve Bank’s Infrastructure Product Owner and Datacom’s Application Release Manager. The model reduced administrative bottlenecks, maintained high retention of institutional knowledge and allowed more work to be delivered in shorter timeframes.
Datacom used the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to replace repetitive manual tasks with reliable automated workflows. This modernised operation brought:
Automation wasn’t deployed simply to increase speed — its aim was to give the Reserve Bank the confidence to make infrastructure changes without introducing risk and vulnerabilities and to enable these changes within approved maintenance windows.
From July 2024 to June 2025, ESAS and NZClear achieved 100% availability. With Datacom’s involvement in the years prior, only a single Priority 1 incident occurred, alongside a handful of Priority 2 cases. This exceptional record was supported by:
Consistently high customer satisfaction reflects the strength of this working relationship, with the RBNZ currently rating Datacom’s performance at 9.2 out of 10 in Relate surveys.
As New Zealand’s economic and regulatory landscape evolves, ESAS and NZClear will need to adapt rapidly — while maintaining strict availability requirements. Datacom’s blend of automation expertise, Agile delivery and embedded knowledge ensures the RBNZ can meet those demands without compromising resilience or security.
“At Datacom, we are proud to have partnered with the RBNZ to deliver a solution that not only achieves near-perfect uptime but does so in a way that is both cost-effective and sustainable. By combining automation with deep sector expertise, our team has helped ensure that our central bank critical systems remain resilient and adaptable, supporting New Zealand’s critical financial infrastructure with confidence and efficiency,” says Santana Faint, Director of Customer Delivery, Datacom.
One driver of success has been the low turnover in the Agile team. Continuity has allowed for retention of deep system knowledge, reducing the learning curve for complex changes and strengthening collaboration with the Reserve Bank’s own staff.
Steve Gordon, head of the RBNZ’s FMI&S Directorate says, “Datacom is always responsive and able to support our high rate of change and availability targets. This allows quick adaptation to evolving requirements, strong support during upgrades and ongoing performance tuning in one of the most critical IT environments in the nation.”
He says takeaways for technology decision‑makers across the financial sector are:
New Zealand's critical infrastructure industries run on digital, interconnected infrastructure, from power grids to cloud-enabled commerce. A complex web of networks powers growth, but also exposes critical systems to cyber, physical and operational risks. It's imperative organisations in critical infrastructure industries are resilient. Digital resilience is the capacity to anticipate, withstand, adapt to and recover from disruption, including cyber attacks and supply chain shocks. It weaves technology, process, compliance and culture to keep operations secure, scalable and future-ready.
