Open banking

Learn how open banking enables you to securely share your bank data with personal finance apps like Smoothy, so you can make your own choices about how you manage your money and financial services.

Updated 30th Aug 2026

What is open banking?

Open banking is a safe, secure way for you to share your bank data with financial apps and services like Xero, Sharesies and Smoothy. Open banking is most commonly used to get ‘bank feeds’, so you don’t have to manually enter bank transaction data into apps, instead your data is automatically always up to date. (Fun fact: Xero revolutionised business accounting by pioneering bank feeds to the world in 2007!)

Open banking has been available in Australia, the UK and USA for several years, and launched in NZ in December 2025. It is regulated by the NZ government and supported by all major NZ banks. Open banking is designed to give you more control over your own data, more choices and access to innovation when using financial services. Power to the people!

All major NZ banks support open banking.

How we use open banking

Many apps use an open banking data provider rather than building a separate connection to every bank. We use Akahu, New Zealand’s most widely used open banking service provider, used by over 100 government, corporate and Fintech orgs including Sorted, Xero, MYOB, PocketSmith, Simplicity, Sharesies, and Westpac (who also part-owns Akahu). If you’ve ever connected bank feeds to a financial app in NZ, chances are you’ve already used Akahu. Read more about Akahu’s security at akahu.nz/safety

Smoothy is powered by Akahu,
NZ’s most trusted open finance data provider.

How safe is open banking?

Open banking is very secure. (There is no way banks would let third-party apps connect to their systems if it wasn’t.) NZ’s open banking system has been in development for almost 10 years, and huge banking infrastructure upgrades were made to facilitate it.

Apps that use official open banking connections never ask for your bank login details (unlike older services like POLi) and cannot access your bank accounts directly. You authorise the data sharing through your mobile banking app, and your bank controls how the data is shared. Access to your data is controlled by a token that your bank gives to authorised third parties, when you give permission to share it. When you revoke (cancel) permission for a particular app, the token no longer works so that app cannot access your data going forward.

Organisations providing apps and services that use open banking have to obtain accreditation to do so, which involves assessment of their technology and security systems and practices and who their employees are.

Your data is kept safe by bank-grade security protocols including TLS (formerly known as SSL) and AES 256 encryption. Learn more about security

What information is shared via open banking?

There are two separate types of access that consumers can authorise:

a) Account Information (transactions and balances)
b) Payment Initiation (the ability to make payments)

Currently, Smoothy only requests Account Information. We request a full 12 months of transactions to ensure that when we are predicting your upcoming expenses, we can predict bills that renew annually like insurance and annual subscriptions - these are so often the ones that catch people out!

We receive ‘read-only’ information so that we can predict your upcoming expenses;

Transaction history from the last 12 months for your chosen accounts
Account balances
Account names and numbers

We do not receive your bank login credentials or the ability to move money, or access to anything you haven’t explicitly shared. We don’t currently provide payment initiation features. If we do in the future, you’ll need to give explicit consent to set up either one-off or recurring payments, and this will be totally optional.

How does data sharing work?

When you choose to share your bank data with a personal finance app like Smoothy, you’ll start the process in that app, then authorise the connection in your mobile banking app.

When you’re ready to connect your bank feeds to Smoothy, you’ll be redirected to Akahu’s secure open banking connection flow to connect your bank feeds.

Give consent for Akahu to transmit your bank transactions to Smoothy
Choose with which accounts you want to share
Approve the open banking connection in your mobile banking app
Confirm your connections in Akahu and return to the Smoothy app

Behind the scenes, your bank gives Akahu a secure token that allows data sharing until you revoke it, and Akahu transmits your transaction data securely to your Smoothy account (and nowhere else).

You can disconnect your accounts from Smoothy in a single click either from inside the Smoothy app, your internet banking app or via My Akahu. All of your data is then automatically deleted and can no longer be accessed by Akahu or Smoothy.

Who regulates open banking in NZ?

The NZ open banking standards are maintained by Payments NZ and regulated by the NZ government / MBIE.

Open banking is part of the Consumer Data Right established by the NZ Customer and Product Data Act 2025. This made it the law that consumers can have control over their own financial data and a safe way to access, share, and manage data such as transaction history with authorised third parties through secure digital systems.

Still got questions or need help?

Check our help articles or contact support@smoothyhq.com

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