A year ago, family lending through Amico did not exist. Today, the platform has been used to document around eighteen million dollars worth of loans between family and friends. Even for the people who built it, that number has been a genuine surprise.

What is behind that eighteen million matters just as much as the figure itself. It has not come from a handful of large transactions. It has come from thousands of ordinary Kiwi families helping each other with house deposits, cars, business ventures and everything in between, one agreement at a time.

The bigger picture: forty billion dollars a year

As big as that number feels, it is a small slice of something much larger. Look at the combined family lending happening across the UK, Australia and New Zealand each year and the figure sits at around forty billion dollars. That is the scale of what is often called the Bank of Mum and Dad, money moving between people who trust each other rather than through traditional finance.

This is not a niche behaviour carried out by a small number of wealthy families. It is thousands upon thousands of everyday people lending to the people they love, every single year, across three countries with very similar financial systems and very similar gaps in how that lending gets managed.

Most of it is still happening quietly, informally, and without any structure at all.

Why the scale matters

For Amico, the size of this market is not just an interesting statistic, it shapes the whole mission. If family lending is already happening at this scale, whether or not there is a platform to support it, then the opportunity is not to convince people to start lending to family. It is to help the people already doing it do it better.

That is a meaningful difference. Amico is not trying to create a new financial behaviour. It is trying to give an existing, deeply human behaviour, the kind of structure and support that has never really existed for it before: a proper agreement, clear terms, and repayments that happen automatically.

Helping a good chunk of them

With eighteen million dollars already documented in the first year, and a forty billion dollar annual market across three countries still largely unserved, the ambition is straightforward: help a good chunk of the people already doing this. Not by changing why families lend to each other, but by making sure that generosity is backed by structure that protects everyone involved.

How Amico helps

Every one of those loans documented through Amico started with the same simple step: agreeing the terms and creating a proper, legally binding agreement through Amico. 

If you are one of the many Kiwis about to lend to someone you love, you are in good company. The only difference Amico makes is ensuring that generosity is documented, tracked and protected properly from day one.

Now with the launch of Amico Repay, repayments happen seamlessly and securely through open banking. What's more, it's all recorded in a ledger that ensures everyone is on the same page.