Our verdict
Pay It Now (PIN)
Operating — Auckland-based, New Zealand owned
Pay It Now occupies the space Easy Crypto left: a New Zealand company that takes New Zealand dollars, sells you cryptocurrency at a quoted price, and puts it in a wallet you control. It has grown beyond that into a payments ecosystem with a Web3 Mastercard and merchant tools. The pricing is spread-based rather than transparent, and the asset range is modest — but for a first purchase from a local business, it is the obvious candidate.
What works
- Genuinely New Zealand-owned and operated
- NZD funding through familiar local rails
- Coins delivered to a wallet you control, not held on account
- Web3 Mastercard and merchant tools in the same ecosystem
- Local support that understands New Zealand banking questions
- Recognised at the 2024 Blockchain NZ Awards
What does not
- Spread-based pricing is not transparent per-trade
- No order book, so no limit orders
- Smaller asset list than the regional exchanges
- Less suited to active trading or large single orders
What it is
Pay It Now started in 2021 as a straightforward on-ramp: pay in New Zealand dollars, receive cryptocurrency in the PIN app wallet. Founded by Craig Duffield and Jitendra Maharaj and run from Auckland, it has since expanded across New Zealand and Australia and grown into something broader — a wallet, an exchange function, a Web3 Mastercard and a set of tools for businesses that want to accept crypto payments.
The core proposition has not changed, though, and it is the one that matters for most people arriving here. You fund in New Zealand dollars by bank transfer, card or POLi, and the coins land in a wallet in the app. That is the model that made Easy Crypto the largest crypto business in the country, and with Easy Crypto gone, Pay It Now is its closest surviving equivalent.
Why "local" still matters
It is easy to dismiss local ownership as sentiment. It is not. Three practical things follow from a provider being based here.
Support understands the context. When your ANZ transfer is held for verification, or you need to explain to Westpac what a payment reference means, a support team in Auckland has had that conversation a hundred times. A Brisbane or Singapore support desk has not.
The dispute path is domestic. A registered New Zealand provider serving retail clients must belong to an approved dispute resolution scheme, which is free to use and can make binding decisions. Against an offshore platform, that machinery is largely theoretical.
And the payment rails are built for here. Bank transfer, card and POLi are what New Zealanders actually use. A platform designed around a different market's payment habits makes you improvise.
What it costs
Like every retailer, Pay It Now prices through the spread. You see a New Zealand dollar figure for the asset and the margin sits inside it. That is simple and it is not deceptive — you know exactly what the purchase costs you — but it is not transparent in the way a stated percentage fee is.
To assess it, open the buy quote and compare it to the spot price on a public exchange at the same moment. Do the same for the sell quote. The round-trip difference is your cost. Expect it to be meaningfully more than the 0.5 to 0.6% an order-book exchange charges, and dramatically less than the 15 to 20% a crypto ATM takes.
For a NZ$200 purchase that difference is a few dollars and the simplicity is worth it. For a NZ$20,000 purchase it is not, and you should be looking at an order book or an OTC desk instead.
The card and merchant side
The Web3 Mastercard is the main New Zealand-issued crypto card, and its existence is the clearest sign that Pay It Now sees itself as a payments company rather than only a retailer. The same applies to the merchant tools, which let a New Zealand business accept crypto and settle in a form it can actually bank.
Both come with the caveat that applies to every crypto payment product in this country: each transaction that converts a cryptoasset is a disposal for tax purposes, and where the asset was acquired with a purpose of disposal, the gain is income taxed at up to 39%. Our cards page and tax guide set out what that means in practice.
Who it suits
Someone making a first purchase who wants a local company, a simple quote and coins delivered to their own wallet. Someone buying modest amounts regularly who values not having to learn an order book. A New Zealand business exploring crypto payments that wants a domestic counterparty.
It is less suited to active traders, to anyone chasing a long tail of assets, and to large single transactions where a spread costs real money. For those, look at Independent Reserve for an order book and OTC, or Swyftx for breadth.
The verification we can and cannot do
We can confirm the company is New Zealand-based, that it operates as an AML/CFT reporting entity, that it appears in New Zealand industry coverage, and that it was recognised at the 2024 Blockchain NZ Awards. We have not audited its financials, its custody arrangements or its reserve position, and no publicly available document would let us.
That limitation applies to every crypto platform serving this market, which is exactly why the self-custody model matters. Coins delivered to a wallet you control are not exposed to the company's solvency in the way an exchange balance is. That is the strongest structural argument in Pay It Now's favour, and it is the one we would weight most heavily.