Enduring Payments

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This guide is relevant for customers of our enduring account connectivity APIs. If you would like information about making one-off payments using official open banking APIs, you can find our one-off payment API reference docs here or contact us at [email protected].

Akahu has historically supported highly flexible enduring payment consent functionality via our classic connections. Some of this functionality is not supported by official open banking APIs. As a result, we are removing support for certain enduring payment features. For consistency, these changes will apply to both classic and official connections going forwards.

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Any changes in payments behaviour will take effect at the same time that official open banking connections are first enabled for your application. This change can be applied to your non-production environments first, then later in production.

Pay-anyone consents

Akahu has historically supported enduring "pay-anyone" consents. Once granted, this type of consent can be used to initiate payments to any New Zealand bank account.

Official open banking APIs require that payee account number(s) must be specified at the time the user grants an enduring payment consent. Payments can only be initiated to payees that are specified in this consent.

As a result of this new constraint, Akahu will no longer support pay-anyone consents for consumers (including via classic connections).

If you want to retain the flexibility of a pay-anyone consent, there is a workaround that you can consider. This option involves splitting the payment into two legs:

• First, your user grants an enduring payment consent to a trust account that you manage so that all payments are initiated to that single account.
• Second, you pay out from the trust account to each payee.

This structure makes the payment experience simple for your users. But you would still need a way to disburse the funds from your trust account. For example, a batch payment file or proprietary API integration with your bank.

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If your application uses a pay-anyone consent in production, you will have received email communication about the this change on November 12th 2025.

Payment consents per-account

Historically, Akahu enduring payment consents have applied to all accounts that the user chooses to share with your application.

Official open banking payment consents are instead applied on a per-account basis. This means that the user must authorise a separate consent with their bank for each account that they wish to enable payments to be made from.

To work with this new constraint, Akahu now allows users to opt-in to a payment consent on a per-account basis. For consistency, this applies to both classic and official connections.

This means that it is possible that only a subset of the accounts that are shared with your application will have payment capabilities available.

Payment limits

The majority of Akahu enduring payment consents (via classic connections) do not include limitations on dollar value of payments that can be initiated via that consent.

Unless your application has payment limits specifically configured (relatively rare), Akahu has not historically applied restrictions on payment amounts aside from our global $100,000 per-payment limit. Instead, any underlying mobile banking "channel" limits apply. These are enforced by the user's bank rather than Akahu. These limits vary bank to bank and take effect at the time the payment is requested (resulting in a payment status of DECLINED).

Official open banking enduring payment consents require that two different types of limit are specified and agreed on at the time of consent authorisation. These are:

• The maximum amount for any single payment initiated via the consent.
• The maximum total (cumulative) amount for a specific time period (daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or annually).

For example, a payment consent could include a single-payment limit of $500 and a periodic limit of $1,500 daily. These parameters would allow for multiple payments to be initiated per day, where each individual payment can not exceed $500, and the sum of all payments for the day can not exceed $1,500. The $1,500 limit would reset at the beginning of the next day.

Each bank has different upper bounds on the payments that can be requested via their open banking channel. These are described below:

¹ANZ: There are no upper bounds on the limits that can be requested for an ANZ enduring payment consent. However a $1,000 per-payment limit is currently being enforced by ANZ at the time of payment initiation. This limit is impractical for many use cases and we have requested that ANZ increases its open banking payment limit to align with its regulatory obligations, which require equivalency with payment limits that are applied in its online channels. ANZ enduring payment consents requested on behalf of your application will include the limits that you give us without modification, even if the single-payment limit exceeds $1,000. While a single-payment limit of >$1,000 could not be practically used today, requesting a higher value will mean that when ANZ increases this limit in the future, your application will have access to any increase without requiring the user to authorise a new consent. In the meantime, you may also choose to break larger payments into multiple chunks of ≤$1,000. If this limitation is not viable for your use case, it may be necessary to delay the migration to ANZ's official API for your application until the payment limit issue is resolved. Migration to official APIs from the other banks will not be affected.

²BNZ: There is no constraint on the periodic limit that can be requested for an enduring payment consent. However, open banking payments share an overarching global daily limit with BNZ's online channels. This limit is enforced at the time of payment initiation and includes all payment activity attributed to a given BNZ customer access number across internet banking and open banking. Because of this, the payment amount available at any given time cannot be known. For individual BNZ customers, this daily limit is $50,000. It is possible for business customers to authorise an increased daily limit directly with BNZ, however this limit will not be available to open banking payments until support is added for business users to authorise access using a business BNZ customer access number (more info).

³Westpac: An overarching $30,000 per-day limit is shared by all open banking transactions initiated on behalf of each Westpac customer. If the customer uses multiple open banking payments services, the limit available to your application on any given day may be less depending on the payment activity created by those other services.

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For consistency, Akahu will now require that both a single-payment limit and period limit are specified for all enduring payment consents, including those backed by classic connections. For classic connections, these limits will continue to apply in conjunction with the underlying channel limits that are currently applied by each bank.