Open banking

What is open banking?

Open banking is part of a new law that requires New Zealand banks to provide a safe and secure way for customers to share their financial data with other service providers. It’s designed to give you more choice and control over managing your finances. This is a very good thing — it’s your data after all!

There are two main open banking features that consumers can authorise in third-party apps:

1. Account information — a read-only view of transactions and balances, often called ‘bank feeds’.
2. Payment initiation — the ability to make one-off and recurring transfers and payments, always authorised by you, through your mobile banking app.

Open banking has been available in Australia and the UK for several years, and launched in New Zealand in December 2025 as part of the Customer and Product Data Act 2025, and Consumer Data Right. The open banking system is regulated by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), and supported by all major New Zealand banks.

Security

Using open banking to share bank feeds with other apps is very secure — banks would not let customers connect their bank accounts to other apps if it wasn’t. Data shared via the open banking system is encrypted in the same way as the data you see in your mobile banking app.

The new, official open banking system is much more secure than older online services that have been used in New Zealand for some time, such as Poli and Account2Account. Instead of giving an app your login details, you approve the connection inside your own bank’s mobile app. Your bank then issues a token that lets the app read the accounts you selected — and nothing else. When you revoke permission, the token stops working and the app can no longer access your data.

How Smoothy uses open banking

Smoothy uses your account information to show your account balances, detect your recurring expenses, predict upcoming costs, calculate what you can safely spend and categorise your spending. Smoothy will soon also offer Payment Initiation so you can authorise one-off or recurring payments to make managing your money easier such as paying bills, putting aside savings, topping up your KiwiSaver, syncing automatic payments with your pay cycle.

We use Akahu, New Zealand’s most widely used open finance provider to facilitate bank feeds and account connections. For ASB, ANZ, BNZ, Kiwibank and Westpac, Akahu connects to banks via your mobile banking app, which does not require you to provide any bank login details.

Akahu also supports ‘classic’ connections for banks such as TSB and other financial services that are not yet integrated with the regulated open banking system. Classic connections are facilitated by Akahu logging in as you to fetch data if you authorise it.

For all connection types, data is encrypted while being transported and while not being viewed by you, and neither Smoothy nor Akahu store any bank or financial service provider login details.
Read more at akahu.nz/safety and Akahu’s privacy policy.

You can disconnect your bank feeds at any time in Smoothy, in your bank’s app, or at my.akahu.nz. When you disconnect your bank accounts or delete your Smoothy account, we no longer have access to your bank feeds and we automatically delete any bank data that we hold. Read our privacy policy for more details.

• Open banking with ANZ
• Open banking with ASB
• Open banking with BNZ
• Open banking with Kiwibank
• Open banking with Westpac

Questions?

Check our help articles or email support@smoothy.nz.