There is a moment every FinTech practitioner in the Pacific knows well. You are sitting across from a village merchant — maybe in the highlands of Viti Levu, maybe on an outer island reachable only by boat — and you watch them accept a payment on a mobile phone that has no bank account behind it, no branch within fifty kilometres, and no credit history anywhere. The transaction clears in seconds. The merchant smiles. And you think: this is what financial inclusion actually looks like.
I have had that moment many times in my years leading financial technology at Vodafone Fiji. And it has made me increasingly impatient with a blind spot at the centre of Australia's Pacific strategy: the absence of a coherent FinTech layer.
The Record Investment — and the Missing Piece
Australia's commitment to the Pacific is, on paper, extraordinary. In 2024–25, Australia provided a record $2.05 billion in development assistance to the Pacific region — making it the largest and longest-standing development partner in the neighbourhood. The Australia–Pacific Regional Development Partnership Plan 2025–2029 sets out ambitious objectives around stability, climate resilience, and shared prosperity. The language is right. The funding is significant. But when I read through the framework, one word is conspicuously underrepresented: payments.
Development aid that flows into a region without functional, low-cost payment infrastructure is like water poured into a cracked vessel. It reaches some people. But much of it leaks — in the form of transaction fees, informal cash handling, and the exclusion of those furthest from a bank branch. I have spent years working to fix that crack in Fiji. Australia needs to take that work seriously at the regional level.
What I Built — and What It Proved
When M-PAiSA launched in Fiji in 2010, 45% of Fijians were unbanked or underbanked. Today, as Head of Financial Technology at Vodafone Fiji, I can report that this figure has fallen to approximately 6%. That transformation did not happen because of a bank branch rollout. It happened because mobile money — built on infrastructure people already had in their pockets — proved that financial inclusion could scale without traditional banking.
The numbers tell the story clearly. M-PAiSA today has over 580,000 registered customers, with more than 335,000 active users every month. The platform processes roughly FJ$36 million in remittances monthly, and was tracking toward over FJ$3 billion in total transactions in 2023. In 2024, M-PAiSA became fully integrated into the national payment system operated by the Reserve Bank of Fiji — a milestone that enables near real-time transfers between bank accounts and mobile wallets, creating a truly interoperable financial ecosystem.
"The once daunting statistic of 45% of Fijians being unbanked is now a relic of the past. Today's figure stands at around 6% — and falling."
What I am most proud of is not the transaction volumes. It is the human outcomes. More than half of M-PAiSA's users are women — a direct reflection of how mobile money reaches people that traditional banking leaves behind. During COVID-19 and Cyclone Harold, when Fiji's tourism economy collapsed overnight, M-PAiSA became a lifeline: the platform partnered with international services including WorldRemit and Wise to enable fee-free remittance transfers, directly sustaining households when formal income vanished. Australia's Pacific Step-Up strategy talks about resilience. This is what resilience looks like in practice.
The Remittance Problem Australia Has Not Solved
Here is where Australia's blind spot costs real money — specifically, it costs Pacific households real money.
Sending AUD from Australia to Pacific nations currently costs an average of 10.1% per transaction — significantly above the global average of 6%, and more than three times the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal target of 3%. A Lowy Institute analysis found that if remittance costs to Fiji, Tonga, and Vanuatu alone were reduced to that 3% UN target, Pacific households would collectively receive more than A$79 million extra every year. That is not a small rounding error in the development ledger. That is a meaningful economic transfer — achieved not by spending more Australian aid dollars, but by fixing the plumbing.
The irony is that the technology to fix this already exists and has already been proven — in Fiji. Wise now integrates directly with M-PAiSA, enabling Fijians living in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK to send money straight to a mobile wallet at near mid-market exchange rates, with no bank account required on the receiving end. This is exactly the model Australia should be backing, scaling, and extending across the region as a formal part of its Pacific engagement strategy.
What a FinTech Layer Would Actually Look Like
I am not arguing that Australia should abandon its infrastructure investments or security cooperation. Those matter. What I am arguing is that every dollar Australia invests in the Pacific will work harder if it travels through — and lands in — a modern digital payments ecosystem. Here is what that could look like in practice.
A Pacific Payments Interoperability Standard. Australia, through DFAT and the RBA, should convene Pacific central banks to establish a shared digital payment standard — modelled on the work already done by the Reserve Bank of Fiji in integrating M-PAiSA into the national payment system. This is not a new idea; it is a proven one that needs political will and coordination to scale.
Leveraging the Telstra–Digicel acquisition. Australia underwrote Telstra's purchase of Digicel Pacific with US$1.33 billion in Export Finance Australia support. Telstra now operates telecommunications infrastructure across Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, and Nauru. This is extraordinary leverage — and it should come with a mandate to roll out brand-agnostic mobile wallets across those networks.
Directing AIFFP investments through digital rails. The Australia Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific has committed billions in projects. Requiring that supplier payments, worker wages, and community distributions flow through digital wallets — not cash — would both accelerate financial inclusion and reduce leakage from corruption and handling costs.
Why This Matters for Australia Too
This is not purely altruistic. Australia has a direct economic interest in a financially included, digitally capable Pacific neighbourhood.
The Pacific seasonal worker program brings tens of thousands of workers to Australian farms each year. These workers send a significant share of their earnings home. Every percentage point reduction in remittance costs leaves more money in Fiji, Samoa, or Vanuatu — and builds more goodwill for Australia than most diplomatic statements. Meanwhile, Australian FinTech companies — neobanks, remittance platforms, payments infrastructure providers — have an extraordinary first-mover opportunity in a region that is actively seeking partners and proven solutions.
Australia's FinTech sector is mature, well-regulated, and internationally respected. The Pacific needs exactly what Australia has. And Australia's Pacific strategy needs to lean into that comparative advantage — not just in the form of aid cheques, but in the form of technology transfer, regulatory collaboration, and genuine commercial partnership.
The View from Inside
I have spent my career at the intersection of mobile technology and financial services in the Pacific. I have watched M-PAiSA grow from a pilot into a platform that processes billions of dollars annually and has lifted nearly forty percentage points of Fijians into formal financial participation. I have negotiated with central banks, designed compliance frameworks, built merchant networks on outer islands, and worked through pandemic-era crises where digital payments were the only payments that worked.
What I know — with conviction that comes from doing, not theorising — is that the Pacific's financial infrastructure story is not a charity case. It is a growth story. And it is one that Australia, with the right policy settings and the right commercial partnerships, is uniquely positioned to shape.
Australia's Pacific Step-Up is an admirable commitment. But a step-up without a digital payments strategy is a strategy that will always underperform its potential. The FinTech layer is not an add-on. It is the foundation on which everything else should be built.
I will be writing about exactly how that can happen — in Fiji, across the Pacific, and in partnership with Australia — in the weeks ahead.