Akahu's transition to the regulated open banking system

Open banking is changing

During the last few years, over 1 million Kiwi consumers have been using unregulated forms of open banking in New Zealand.

This activity has been driven by budgeting tools, accounting and tax solutions, loan applications, online payments, and a variety of other use cases.

Now that New Zealand's regulated open banking system is operational, this unregulated activity has started to transition to the new system.

Akahu's role in the regulated system

Akahu provides open banking connectivity to a broad range of government, corporate, and fintech organisations. We facilitate this connectivity through a network of data integrations with New Zealand banks.

This network has historically used unregulated forms of open banking. But Akahu is now an "accredited requestor", meaning that we are a direct participant in New Zealand's regulated open banking system.

The open banking regulation requires the five largest New Zealand banks (ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Kiwibank, and Westpac) to make open banking APIs available to accredited requestors.

The regulated system is better

The regulated system is a major improvement over unregulated forms of open banking:

• The customer authenticates directly with their bank when authorising access, rather than entering their login credentials into a third party service.
• Accredited requestors have certainty over access to regulated bank APIs, instead of each bank being able to dictate which organisations are allowed access.
• Accredited requestors have fair and consistent terms of access, which are governed by the regulation rather than through a custom contract with each bank.
  

Bank coverage

The four largest banks have been required to comply with the open banking regulation since 1 December 2025. Kiwibank's regulatory deadlines are later than the largest four banks. Kiwibank will deliver a payment initiation API by the end of May 2026, and an account information API by the end of November 2026.

Smaller banks do yet not have obligations to comply with the regulated open banking system. Akahu continues to use "classic connections" for these banks, which are facilitated by Akahu logging in as the customer in order to fetch the data or initiate the payment in accordance with the customer's instructions.

Akahu's current state of transition

Out of the 110 organisations and products that are accredited to use Akahu for open banking connectivity, 49 have completed their transition to New Zealand’s new regulated open banking system, and another 13 are actively migrating right now.

For consumers that are using one of these products, the transition is as simple as going through the open banking flow again. Akahu has been working with our app partners to ensure that your connections will seamlessly migrate to the regulated system without losing data or causing duplicate records.

We expect to complete the transition to the regulated open banking system for the four largest banks during April 2026.

More info

The arrival of regulated open banking is an important step forward for security, consumer control, and innovation. We're proud to be one of the first accredited participants, and to help our app partners transition to the regulated system.

If you have any questions regarding the transition, please contact us through the link below.