Open banking

How Smoothy uses open banking

Smoothy uses bank feeds to show your account balances, spot your recurring expenses and subscriptions, predict what’s coming up, and work out how much is safe to spend. You never have to type in a transaction.

When you connect, Smoothy receives 12 months of transaction history for the accounts you choose, then new transactions each day until you disconnect.

What Smoothy gets

• Transaction history for the last 12 months, and new transactions from then on
• Transaction dates, amounts, descriptions and merchant names
• Account names, numbers and types
• Account balances

What Smoothy doesn’t get

• Your bank login details
• Direct access to your bank accounts
• The ability to move money or make payments
• Any account you haven’t chosen to share

Smoothy and Akahu

Smoothy connects to your bank through Akahu. Akahu is New Zealand’s open finance platform. We use Akahu to fetch transaction data from the bank accounts you connect. Find out more about Akahu.

Smoothy never asks for or stores your bank login details.

Read more at akahu.nz/safety and Akahu’s privacy policy.

Managing your connection

The Accounts screen in Smoothy lists the bank accounts you have shared.

You can stop sharing at any time in Smoothy, in your bank’s app, or at my.akahu.nz. my.akahu.nz also lists any other apps you have connected through Akahu.

When you stop sharing or delete your Smoothy account, we delete the bank data we hold for you. See our privacy policy for details.

What is open banking?

Open banking is a government-regulated way for you to share your bank data with apps you choose. It has been available in Australia and the UK for several years. New Zealand’s open banking service launched in December 2025 under the Customer and Product Data Act 2025, which established the Consumer Data Right. The law requires banks to give customers control over their own financial data, with a safe way to share it with authorised third parties such as personal finance apps.

The technical standards are published by Payments NZ’s API Centre and supported by all major New Zealand banks:

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

There are two kinds of access a consumer can authorise:

1. Account information — a read-only view of transactions and balances, also known as bank feeds. This is what Smoothy uses.
2. Payment initiation — the ability to make transfers and payments. Smoothy does not use this.

Bank feeds are what made Xero’s accounting revolution possible back in 2007 — your transactions arrive automatically, so they’re always up to date and you never have to key them in.

How secure is open banking?

Banks would not let third-party apps connect to their systems if it wasn’t. New Zealand’s system took almost ten years to develop, with major upgrades to bank infrastructure along the way.

It works like this. Instead of giving an app your login details (as older services like POLi required), 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.

Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Every connection to Smoothy uses HTTPS, and our database and its backups are encrypted with AES-256. Because you connect through Akahu, Smoothy never sees your bank username or password. Learn more about how Smoothy protects your data.

Still got questions?

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

Learn more: How Smoothy works · Setting up bank feeds · Security · About Akahu