Member Spotlight — OtherPay

Introducing Intent to the Future of Financial Transactions

In today’s digital economy, moving money has become almost effortless.  Payments clear in seconds, banking happens from a phone, and financial services are increasingly embedded into everyday platforms.  Yet as financial systems have become faster and more connected, a critical question has emerged that most existing infrastructure struggles to answer:

How do we know a transaction was genuinely intended by the person authorising it?

For Simon Hewitt and his co-founders at Australian fintech OtherPay, this question exposes one of the most overlooked structural vulnerabilities in modern financial systems.

Over numerous decades, the payments industry has invested heavily in authentication technologies - from PINs and passwords to biometrics, one-time codes and in-app push notification.  These tools help confirm identity and protect accounts from unauthorised access.  But authentication only answers one question: who is performing the transaction?  It doesn’t necessarily confirm whether the transaction itself was genuinely intended.

That distinction sits at the heart of a rapidly growing category of financial crime.

The Hidden Gap in Payment Security

Many of today’s most damaging fraud attacks no longer rely on bypassing security systems.  Instead, they manipulate the user.

Social engineering scams, authorised push payment (APP) fraud, and account compromise attacks increasingly involve convincing victims to authenticate transactions themselves.  Once a user enters their credentials or biometric confirmation, the financial system assumes the transaction is legitimate.

From the system’s perspective, the correct person approved the payment.

But in many cases, the payment was never truly intended.

“Authentication alone cannot determine intent,” says Hewitt. “If someone is deceived or pressured into approving a transaction, the system still treats it as authorised. That’s a structural limitation of how financial infrastructure currently works.”

While scammers may attempt to pressure victims earlier in the process, separating intent from authentication fundamentally disrupts these attacks by forcing manipulation to occur before the transaction pathway is even opened - making coercion more visible, more detectable, and significantly harder to execute at scale.

As digital payments accelerate globally, financial institutions are facing growing losses from scams that occur after authentication, rather than before it.

Rather than focusing solely on stronger authentication, OtherPay has taken a different approach.

From Authentication to Intent

OtherPay was founded to address this gap by introducing a new architectural control layer for financial transactions: Decoupled Intent-based Authorisation (DIbA).

DIbA separates transaction intent from authentication and execution, introducing a new step before authentication can occur.

Instead of simply asking users to confirm a payment, the system first verifies that the user has explicitly declared their intended financial action.  Only once intent has been established does authentication take place and the transaction proceed.

This shift fundamentally changes how transactions are controlled.

By separating intent from authentication, the architecture creates a clearer signal about what the user actually meant to do.  It also introduces a natural interruption at the exact point where many scams succeed - when victims are pressured into approving payments.

“Modern payment systems have become incredibly efficient,” Hewitt explains. “But efficiency often comes at the cost of control.  Introducing verified intent restores a level of transparency and protection that current systems simply don’t provide.”

Introducing DUO: Intent-Controlled Payments

The first commercial expression of this architecture is OtherPay DUO, a next-generation payment card ecosystem designed to demonstrate how intent-based transaction control can operate in real-world payment environments.

Expressions of interest are currently open for the limited edition of the founder’s DUO card.

DUO combines a payment card (Mastercard prepaid) with the OtherPay HUB interface, allowing users to declare their intended action before authentication and transaction execution occur.

This approach maintains a familiar payment experience while introducing a powerful additional layer of protection against scams and financial manipulation.

Beyond consumer protection, the architecture also generates new behavioural transaction signals that financial institutions can use to improve fraud detection and anti-money laundering monitoring.

Because intent is declared independently of authentication, banks can identify mismatches between declared intent, authentication events and transaction behaviour - signals that traditional payment systems do not capture.

In an environment where fraud losses continue to rise globally, these signals could provide financial institutions with more meaningful indicators of suspicious activity.

Building Infrastructure for the Financial Ecosystem

While DUO represents the first user-facing product, OtherPay’s ecosystem and transaction control infrastructure can operate across the financial ecosystem.

The company’s technology has been designed to integrate with existing payment network infrastructure, allowing banks, fintech platforms and payment providers to adopt intent-based verification without replacing their current systems.

This reflects a growing trend within fintech where innovation increasingly occurs within the architecture of financial systems, rather than solely through consumer applications.

OtherPay’s intellectual property portfolio - including patents and international filings covering DIbA and related transaction logic - forms a key component of this long-term strategy.

Looking Ahead

As digital finance continues to expand, the need for stronger foundations of trust and security will only grow.

For OtherPay, the long-term vision is clear: introduce a new global standard for transaction control where financial actions cannot occur without verified intent.

If successful, intent-based authorisation could reshape how transactions are approved across payments, banking, remittances and emerging financial services.

“At the end of the day, financial systems exist to serve people,” says Hewitt. “If we can make those systems safer, more transparent and more trustworthy, that benefits everyone - from individual consumers to financial institutions and the broader economy.”

In a world where financial systems are becoming faster and more automated, ensuring that transactions truly reflect human intent may become one of fintech’s most important next frontiers.