By the time a bank spots a suspicious payment, a scammer may have spent weeks building trust, moving money and preparing to drain someone’s savings.
Fraud expert Damian Matich wants to spot the danger earlier, by looking beyond the transactions any single bank can see.
His startup, Tōtara Canopy, is developing scam protection that uses open banking to connect the dots across a customer’s accounts. The aim is to identify the financial warning signs before a convincing story becomes a devastating loss.
The need is clear. Banks reported $265 million lost to scams in 2025 according to Payments NZ’s Reported Fraud Monitor. That’s likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Netsafe and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance surveyed 1000 Kiwis in 2025 and found 72% had encountered a scam, nearly a quarter losing money.
With the average loss reaching $3352, that would amount to around $3 billion, or roughly 0.75% of gross domestic product (GDP).
“Around 30% of all New Zealand crime now is scams,” says Matich, referring to data from the New Zealand Crime and Victims Survey. “The psychology of deception is so pervasive and so entrenched and so deep that victims of scams just feel it’s a psychological disaster for them.”
For Matich, education alone cannot solve a problem involving sophisticated criminals and people being carefully manipulated.
“It’s a detection and forecasting problem,” he says.
Experience meets a fresh approach
Matich brings decades of international financial crime experience to the challenge.
After moving to Britain in the late 1990s, he found himself recruited into fraud prevention. He went on to run fraud loss reduction programmes at major UK banks, working with them, European and US banks and the key solution providers in the space. He later ran the Australian operation for a global vendor before returning to New Zealand.
That background shaped his view that scam prevention needs a broader perspective.
A bank can scrutinise activity within its own systems. But a customer may hold savings, investments and everyday accounts across several institutions. The warning signs can emerge in the movement between them.
Matich points to someone liquidating investments and gathering the proceeds into a cash account, ready to send to a scammer. Each transaction might have an explanation. Together, they could tell a different story.
Tōtara Canopy’s consumer service, Canopy Protect, uses customers’ consent both to access transaction data via the open banking protocol and connect to additional data points such as your Facebook application programming interface (API), and screen it daily for scam risk.
When it detects a concerning pattern, the AI-powered service alerts the customer, their bank, and their nominated trusted guardian, bringing another person into a situation where a scammer may be working hard to isolate their target.
Canopy Protect acts as an early warning service, not a tool that can freeze payments.
“We cannot block the transaction. That’s up to the banks to do,” Matich says.
Instead, the service analyses daily batches of information. Matich says the opportunity lies in spotting developing scams, including those where moving savings and investments takes several days.
Research behind the protection
The approach has taken shape through a research partnership with AUT that has been supported by funding from Cifas, the UK’s leading fraud prevention service with over 770 members, including the largest banks, telcos and industry players.
Matich says the first research phase began in May and finished in September. The team built synthetic transaction datasets designed to reflect the New Zealand and UK payment environments, then introduced different scam patterns to test how effectively models could detect them.
“We have 15 different classes of models that we can run,” he says. “The performance of these models is several times, in some cases up to 20 times, higher than current industry models.”
That gives the researchers scope to test different techniques against different threats, rather than rely on one method to catch everything.
The next step is to turn the research into a working consumer service and demonstrate its value outside the research environment.
Canopy Protect is the first part of a planned ecosystem of six products linking consumers, banks and government. The wider ambition is to help identify not just individual scams, but the networks of accounts criminals use to move stolen money.
Giving consumers a stake
Tōtara Canopy is seeking a minimum of $300,000 to get its initial consumer service running. Alongside approaches to wholesale investors, it is turning to the public through PledgeMe.
The idea is to give the people who need better protection an opportunity to help build it and own a stake in the business.
The company is seeking a minimum $100 investment for 100 shares. Investors who opt into its Friends of Tōtara programme and support the January-to-March 2027 beta programme can also receive a year of Canopy Protect for one person. The campaign is scheduled to close on Monday, November 30.
Crowdfunding will help move the service into consumers’ hands without waiting for the whole banking industry to adopt the new approach. Early users will help refine the service ahead of a wider launch.
For Matich, whose hobby is ocean endurance swimming, the ambition is rooted in the damage scams leave behind: lost savings, damaged relationships and people reluctant to tell anyone what happened.
“I remember swimming the Wairau River that runs from Lake Te Anau into Manapouri. The water was cold and the current fast, over rocks, fallen trees and whirlpools – it was crazy,” he says.
“It’s a bit like that with Tōtara Canopy. But we urgently need to do something, and do it now, to tackle the rising tide of scams and fraud.”
Learn more at www.totaracanopy.com and read the crowdfunding offer here.
Equity crowdfunding can be risky. Read the offer information carefully and consider independent financial advice.