Akahu is New Zealand's leading open finance intermediary.
We maintain data integrations with New Zealand banks and other financial service providers, and bundle those integrations into a simple, unified API for developers.
This enables developers to outsource the “infrastructure layer”, and focus instead on delivering value to users at the “experience layer”.
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Akahu’s journey began when Ben Lynch was working in the bank feeds team at Xero in 2013. He grew frustrated with the unreliable intermediary data integrations that were used to fetch transaction data into Xero, and decided to build integrations for his personal bank accounts.
That side project turned into a full time project called Jude, where the data integrations were used to power features like account aggregation, round-up, and sweeping.
Then In December 2020, the data integrations were transferred into a new company called Akahu, and became available as an API product to external developers. We announced an investment from the venture arm of Westpac New Zealand at that same time.
Today, Akahu is New Zealand's leading open finance intermediary, providing API services to 100+ government, corporate, and fintech organisations.
Akahu supports integrations with official open banking APIs whenever possible, and expects the vast majority of traffic to use the regulated open banking system over time.
Akahu is an "accredited requestor", meaning that we are a direct participant in New Zealand's regulated open banking system.
Where possible, Akahu connects to banks using this regulated system.
Look for the official mark to know when you're being invited to use the regulated open banking system.
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We also support "classic connections" with banks and other financial service providers that are not part of the regulated open banking system.
Classic connections are facilitated by Akahu logging in as you in order to fetch the data or initiate the payment in accordance with your instructions.
Akahu is a made-up word.
It had the practical hallmarks - short, good domains available, doesn't breach anyone's IP.
But it was inspired by a word relating to custodianship. We consider that to be our most important role - a trusted custodian of data connections for consumers.
