Account information

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This guide is relevant for customers of both our one-off or enduring account connectivity APIs.

Account data fields

The account information that Akahu makes available to your application via our API will remain largely the same for accounts connected using official connections. However there are some notable differences to be aware of which may affect your integration. These are described in more detail below.

Loan details

For loan accounts connected using classic connections, Akahu provides detailed loan information via the meta.loan_details field such as the loan repayment structure, interest rate and expiry, term/maturity, and interest-only status.

None of the data elements in Akahu's meta.loan_details field are supported by the open banking standards, so this field is not available for loan accounts connected via official connections.

Availability of account holder name

For accounts connected via a classic connection, Akahu provides the name (or names) of all account holders in the meta.holder field of the account item returned from our API (only applicable if this data is included in the scope of access requested by your app).

For accounts connected via official connections, the value returned in this field may be incomplete or unavailable in the following scenarios:

Joint accounts

If an account is jointly held, only the name of the person who authorised the data sharing request will be returned in the meta.holder field (assuming that they are one of the account holders).

Akahu identifies this scenario with the presence of a new field, meta.has_unlisted_holders. You can use this field to determine that there are additional account holders. The identity of unlisted holders cannot be determined using official open banking APIs.

Delegate access

If the person who authorised the data sharing request is not an account holder, and the account is an individually held account (e.g. a parent who has authorised access to their child's bank account), the meta.holder field will not be available.

In scenarios where the meta.holder field is unavailable, requests to Akahu's name verification API endpoint will fail.

This issue does not affect business accounts shared via delegate access. For business accounts, meta.holder will contain the business name as per usual.

Account type

Due to the implementation of some banks' open banking APIs, Akahu's ability to accurately determine the account type may be reduced.

When an account type cannot be determined, a fallback of CHECKING (enduring access API) or DEPOSITORY (one-off access API) will be assigned by Akahu.

Account attributes

Due to data availability limitations when using official open banking APIs, Akahu is unable to accurately determine some attributes for accounts connected using this method.

• TRANSACTIONS - Akahu assumes that all accounts connected using official open banking APIs have transactions available, even though some do not. Because of this, there may be instances where the TRANSACTIONS attribute is assigned incorrectly.
• PAYMENT_TO - Akahu has to assume that all BECS-addressable accounts (those with a standard New Zealand bank account number in the format XX-XXXX-XXXXXXX-XX) can receive payments. We are not aware of any scenarios where this assumption is incorrect, however the determination of the PAYMENT_TO attribute now relies on this assumption. This may not be as robust as the explicit checks we are able to to make for an equivalent classic connection.
• PAYMENT_FROM - Akahu will assign this parameter based on whether or not we believe this account can be used to initiate open banking payments (via a one-off or enduring payment consent). This capability information isn't provided by official open banking APIs, so Akahu has to take a best effort approach, including inspecting properties like the product name (e.g. some savings products can't be used to initiate open banking payments). Because of this, we cannot guarantee that this attribute will be correct 100% of the time.

Transaction data

Transaction data availability

Transaction data availability via official open banking APIs is approximately equivalent to classic Akahu connections, with the following notable exceptions:

ASB

• Transaction data is unavailable for most ASB loan accounts (excludes Orbit revolving home loans).

Transaction date

In some cases, the value provided in the date field may differ to the date field that is available from the equivalent classic connection:

• Transaction dates sourced from official open banking APIs may be missing a time component.
• The date field may have different semantics. For example, where the date sourced from a classic connection reflected the date that the transaction took place, it may instead reflect the date that the transaction was settled by the bank.

Transaction type

Due to the implementation of some banks' open banking APIs, Akahu's ability to accurately determine the transaction type may be reduced.

When a specific transaction type cannot be determined, a fallback of CREDIT or DEBIT will be assigned by Akahu.