Official Open Banking APIs

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.

As of December 1st 2025, the four largest New Zealand banks (ANZ, ASB, BNZ, and Westpac) have made official open banking APIs available to third party services under the new Consumer Data Right (CDR) legislation. The key advantage of these APIs is that authorisation happens directly between the user and their bank, removing the need for credential sharing.

Akahu has developed new integrations with these official open banking APIs and applied to become accredited under the CDR regime. We are currently prioritising the migration of existing traffic to use these new integrations in a swift and orderly manner. We aim to migrate all traffic to official open banking APIs by March 31 2026 (where such APIs are available from a given bank).

Transitioning to official open banking APIs

Akahu aims to make the transition to using official 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:

OAuth Authorisation Flow (one-off and enduring)
Feature Support (one-off and enduring)
Migrating from classic connections (enduring)

The future state of open finance

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

Where official 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 official 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 official 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.