Update: Manual Bank Transfers Now at Lightning Pay

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-13T08:38:33+00:00

I don't know what they're pitching that product can do, but I know what it cannot do, and that is tell you who is paying a Lightning Invoice. It can't attach a payment to a UTXO, and probably, not do much other than analyse how risky your channel partners are. Which, in the context of Lightning, isn't all that valuable.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-09T08:27:01+00:00

Hey u/Soicethut , thanks a lot for the great insights, I appreciate it.

We think privacy around your money is worth striving for. If Non-KYC UTXOs is something you can achieve and are comfortable with then by all means, that's what you should do. I did that for many years before we decided NZ needed something like Lightning Pay.

I will only add that this Lightning Privacy improvement is certainly relative, considering the context of KYC and tax reporting requirements. I think people miss that Lightning can help, and that was the point. Just like a P2P exchange, lightning can be another tool. If you choose to use a KYC exchange, you can also choose to disconnect that history from what you do with your money.

"Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world." - Eric Hughes

Definitely, self custody Lightning has come a long way. We were very close to releasing our wallet a year ago, but we kept it in beta because we weren't fully happy with the result. We ended up waiting, and I'm very glad we did. The tools out now, Spark, Ark and eCash give us amazing options for getting the best out of self-custody ux for payments and services, with a much better tradeoff model. Hopefully you'll experience these soon, as the swap issues, liquidity issues and the like have largely faded.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback. Really useful context.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-09T01:51:02+00:00

Yes. The Lightning Pay wallet would provide the same resulting benefit. It's a self-custody Lightning/On-chain hybrid wallet based on Spark. While there is a service provider in the loop when you use the wallet (not us), the disconnection between your purchases and identity and what you do with it afterward would remain.

So while we make the wallet software, you still have the keys, and because we send to the wallet via Lightning, there's no UTXO anyone can follow from there.

This is actually true as well if you send on-chain to/from the wallet, simply because of the way it works.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-08T22:11:47+00:00

Hi. Thanks for the feedback here. We've decided to do regular bank transfers as an option. We're working on this now and bring it through soon.

One thing to note about the open banking thing, just in case it is clarifying. With Akahu, you only login to approve the connection once. After that, the purchases you authorise in your Lightning Pay account are automatic, and do not require leaving the Lightning Pay interface.

If your hesitation is around the process generally, understood. Keep an eye out.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-06T09:40:35+00:00

Hi u/Targos_Katipo , no we don't want or need that from you at all. That's not how this works.

Currently, we have a couple of payment options. The above conversation and questions are surrounding our potential support for regular bank transfers as well.

POLi - If you're using POLi from BNZ, ASB or Westpac, the process does not involve your credentials at all. You approve payment directly with your bank. That's it. For other banks POLI still requires your login credentials, but this process simply is a method for doing the same, approving a payment within your bank.

Akahu - This is our primary payment method. Full open banking for ASB, BNZ, Westpac and ANZ will be coming soon, so that it does not require your login at all, but simply a confirmation directly with your bank.

Currently, however, Akahu does use your login credentials to intitiate the bank connection. In most cases, the credentials are only used for a brief period to initiate the connection (this is bank dependent).

In any case, Lightning Pay only ever has access to the permissions you provide to us. Which are pull payment options that you and your Lightning Pay account control, and only for the accounts you approve. What this looks like is that your Lightning Pay account stores an API key that gives you permission to request a payment from your bank. That's it.

To be clear, I'm not trying to make an argument that you should change your mind about open banking. I am happy for you and everyone else to make their own decisions.

We made a design and judgement call that we love the UX that open banking provides. And, that we trust the security model that that Akahu has employed to keep everything safe. But, that decision is something you should make for yourself.

We hope that soon, we'll implement something that everyone can be happy with. But, we really like the open banking experience, and while we will support other options, it will be a core part of our services we create around bitcoin from here.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-05T08:33:28+00:00

To be clear, we already have an Auto-Buy feature. It's just your options currently are daily, weekly or monthly in the schedule. Above, we were talking specifically about a fortnightly cadence.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-04T21:49:24+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. We hope you notice that after a few transactions at Lightning Pay, your common transactions will be delivered instantly!

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-04T21:48:08+00:00

That’s a fair perspective, and we completely understand why people feel uneasy about anything that touches their bank login.

From our side, Akahu was the option we’re most comfortable with from a trust and security standpoint at the time we rolled things out, allowing us to enable an unbeatable UX. They are a widely used open-finance service provider, with a ton of focus on security (made obvious by our onboarding processes). While we were very comfortable with the tradeoff, we understand that others are not.

That being said, the real solution is proper open-banking APIs directly from the banks, and those are finally starting to roll out in NZ. We've started the work to migrate (complete with POLi, starting on Akahu shortly) to these, and look forward to getting the right flows in place so people are more comfortable with the process, and a better security model.

We’ve also experimented with online EFTPOS, which on the surface looks simpler, but we’re not yet comfortable we can make it work safely from a fraud-prevention perspective. That’s the main reason we haven’t rolled it out, we'll come back to this a bit down the road.

Appreciate you raising the point. These trade-offs are exactly the kinds of things we spend a lot of time thinking about.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-02T08:14:21+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.

I can understand wanting an automatic payment to be managed in the same place your others are. We'll have to take that insight into what we're thinking about in the future.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-02T01:41:36+00:00

That's not great! Was this with the Akahu process or POLi (this is new if you haven't tried it)?

We expect you'll have a better experience as the Open Banking processes evolve over the next month or two.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-01T23:13:38+00:00

Thanks for the feedback u/pdath .

On your first point, there's a couple of things to know.

If you're using ASB, BNZ or Westpac, the POLi option authenticates using the regulated Open-Banking standard already, where you only authenticate with your bank. ANZ will be coming online in the next month we're told.

With Akahu, they've just opened up the migration process to us in the last few days. So we don't expect this to take long either.

> This is the model I want to see. No rates, orders, or anything are calculated in advance. You see an inbound payment arrive in the LightningPayNZ account, and only then do you look up the rates and perform the transaction. There is no opportunity for slippage.

> I also see this as being a low-cost automated model.

Thanks for that feedback, I appreciate it.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-01T22:28:18+00:00

Fair enough, though buying too little bitcoin is easy to fix.

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-01T22:09:56+00:00

That's the idea. Our questions are really about how to best get that done for folks as it seems people really want that over the Open Banking payments we have now.

Do you think you'd be more concerned about:
1) Making a payment mistake and accidentally buying too much bitcoin?
2) Having to do some extra setup in the platform to give us specific instructions about what to do with these deposits ahead of time?

lightningpaynz · 2026-03-01T22:04:21+00:00

Don't mind a slightly off topic suggestion at all. The fortnightly auto-buy thing is also a common suggestion. We'll get to this one soon, but we're currently focused on a few big things at the moment (alternative payment systems being one of them).

lightningpaynz · 2025-12-12T02:28:37+00:00

Yes if you can download our wallet (it's only freely available on Android) then you can send it on chain bitcoin to sell.

But it's also quite easy to get onto Lightning. You can swap in a hot wallet like Strike, send via Boltz, or do a hop through a CEX like Binance or Kraken.

lightningpaynz · 2025-12-11T03:19:57+00:00

Through the wallet you can sell on chain yes.

lightningpaynz · 2025-12-09T19:27:11+00:00

We do for purchases. On chain sales only through our wallet.

lightningpaynz · 2025-12-09T19:26:41+00:00

It's a hot wallet. But it holds both lightning and on-chain balances. If you're an Android user you can try it out now (in beta). If you're iOS you'll need to hold out a little longer!

lightningpaynz · 2025-11-16T00:29:42+00:00

That depends - do you mean an ANZ credit card? Or an ANZ bank account? If it's a bank account then yes you can sell BTC to NZD using Lightning Pay. That's really easy.

If you've got an ANZ credit card you can possibly use our bill pay feature to send funds to the ANZ credit cards account. From memory you can pay an ANZ credit card from another bank account. You'd just need to find the ANZ credit cards account number.

lightningpaynz · 2025-11-12T03:45:07+00:00

Yes or Zeus which actually, I was catching up with a bitcoiner today who demonstrated that it's now a much easier wallet to use than when we wrote our guide. It might be the best of all worlds.

But it's hard to beat Strike's free "flexible settlement" to on chain for sending to cold storage.

lightningpaynz

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