Guides

Dedicated Open Banking APIs

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Akahu has traditionally facilitated the connection to your users’ financial accounts using proprietary, reverse-engineered integrations developed by Akahu. We refer to these as classic connections.

The largest New Zealand banks have started to make dedicated open banking APIs available to third party services. The key advantage of these APIs is that authorisation happens directly between the user and their bank, removing the need for credential sharing.

Akahu develops new integrations with these dedicated open banking APIs as they are made available to us. Early versions of the APIs have limited functionality and performance. But as they improve, we will be able to migrate more of our existing traffic across. We aim to migrate all traffic to open banking APIs by the end of 2026 (where such APIs are available from a given bank).

Transitioning to dedicated open banking APIs

Akahu aims to make the transition to using dedicated open banking APIs as seamless as possible for our API customers. Your application will continue to interface with the same Akahu APIs as usual, and in many cases the technical interfaces to our OAuth authorisation flow will remain unchanged.

Please see the following for more information on any necessary changes for your application before you start using these APIs:

The future state of open finance

Over the coming years, Akahu will continue to support integrations with financial service providers via a combination of dedicated open banking APIs and classic, reverse engineered integrations.

Where dedicated open banking APIs are available and sufficient to support a given use case, Akahu will migrate traffic to those APIs. But not all financial service providers will deliver third party APIs in the near term, and therefore other access methods will remain important for many use cases.

To make it simple for existing Akahu customers to start using new open banking APIs, Akahu is integrating with these new APIs in a way that causes minimal breaking changes. This means that, for the most part, you can continue to interface with Akahu in the way you currently do. If there are any breaking changes, or implementation details to consider, we will communicate these matters with you and provide thorough documentation as above.

If you would like to discuss anything in more detail, please contact our team.

Updated 2 days ago