Our Future Services programme
We are building a customer-centric, streamlined immigration system to make it easier for people to use our services.
Building a better immigration system
The 7-year Our Future Services programme builds on work already done to deliver a trusted and effective immigration system.
The programme will deliver a more cost-effective immigration system that is more productive, more effective at managing immigration risk and provides a better experience for our customers and staff. It is designed to address four key areas:
- making visa processing more efficient
- mitigating risk of technology and service failure
- proactive and sophisticated risk management
- improved customer and user experience.
A more customer-centric Immigration New Zealand
One platform for visa submissions and processing
As part of the programme, the enhanced Immigration Online system - also known as ADEPT - will become the single customer submission channel and visa application processing system.
Customers can expect:
- a simpler, faster and more user-friendly application process
- smart application forms that ask customers for information specific to their situation
- increased self-service capabilities including being able to check their application status in real-time within their dashboard
- consistently reduced average processing times for visas – as seen from previous product transitions, such as permanent resident visas.
The programme has transitioned the following visa products to the enhanced Immigration Online system:
- International Student Visas in August 2025.
The next products to transition are:
- Group Visitor Visas in March 2026
- Partners and Dependants of Temporary Visa holders in April 2026.
Designing our organisation to better suit our customers
As more products move to enhanced Immigration Online and our risk management capabilities improve, we will be able to design our organisation around getting the best outcomes for our customers.
An efficient and fully digital immigration system will mean that our workforce can be trained and deployed to best meet customer needs. We’re currently working through what this looks like in practice.
Improved risk management across the immigration system
The programme will strengthen risk management across the immigration system so we’re better able to identify risk and respond to it earlier. Improved and integrated functionality in our systems will make more data and information readily available to staff to support quality decision-making.
An Immigration Harm Index is also currently in development, which will use data and insights to provide a baseline dollar value of harmful immigration outcomes. It will help customers and the public understand how we identify immigration harm and why we use a variety of proportionate tools to address it.