Who are Akahu?
Akahu are our data provider for connecting to banks within New Zealand. We absolutely trust them, and they have a great team backing up the solution which has been in the market since 2017.
Akahu and NZ Open Banking
PocketSmith uses Akahu as an intermediary to offer feeds from New Zealand banks and financial institutions. Since the regime launched in December 2025, Akahu have become an Accredited Requestor, meaning they've got the thumbs-up from the government to request data under open banking.
From here, Akahu will be building integrations with the banks, and ensuring the quality of the data is up to standard and that the authorisation and consent flows are working well. Once they're satisfied the integrations are performing well, they'll allow us to enable it for PocketSmith users.
We currently have open banking feeds available for ANZ and BNZ.
ASB, Westpac and Kiwibank will follow soon - we’re just waiting on them to iron out some technical issues before we can make them available.
We’ll be sure to make an announcement as we bring open banking feeds for our other New Zealand banks!
What about NZ institutions that don’t have Open Banking available?
The difference between Akahu and other data providers is that, where possible, they access your banking data via the same access mechanisms / APIs as the bank's own mobile apps. So when you're adding a connection via Akahu, it's the same thing as if you're registering a new device for your bank's mobile app.
The great thing about this, in addition to speed and reliability, is that though they ask for your username and password, Akahu won't store those credentials in order to offer the feed, whenever possible. Instead, Akahu just passes these over to your bank right away for the first verification step, and then after the subsequent connection process, they receive an access token that they use to fetch ongoing data.
However, depending on the provider, this might not be possible—in these cases, Akahu will store your credentials encrypted to keep them safe. In either case, your credentials never touch PocketSmith's network.
You can also revoke the token that is given to Akahu from the bank's device management page too, any time.
You can read more about Akahu and their security on their website, https://www.akahu.io.
Authorising Akahu feeds
Once you have your Akahu feed available, you can start authorizing this new feed by heading to the Feeds page (Manage > Feeds), finding your new Akahu feed, and selecting AUTHORIZE.
You’ll need to accept permissions to allow Akahu to access the official open banking feed when authorizing a feed that has open banking enabled.
Once you step through the authorization process, you'll be guided back to PocketSmith to link your existing accounts to the new Akahu feed.
If you have been using another data provider previously for this feed, your existing accounts should be automatically selected to be linked to your new Akahu feed accounts. You should just need to confirm they're correct and click SUBMIT. You can find an illustrated guide for this here: Linking feed accounts to existing accounts.
Syncing Akahu feeds
Akahu feeds will automatically sync in the background, roughly every 12 to 24 hours after you make a transaction on one of the accounts on the feed.
There is also a manual "Sync now" button to trigger a sync as you would with our other data providers.
We understand that you should see transactions appear in PocketSmith within 24 hours of the transaction occurring. Our observations have been that transactions appear much, much quicker than 24 hours, too.
If you have transactions that occurred over 48 hours ago that have not been automatically imported by the feed, please reach out via ? > Feed help from PocketSmith's main navigation menu. We'll require a screenshot from your bank's online banking site that shows the transactions that have not been imported into PocketSmith to then open a service request with Akahu.
Differences in Supported Account Types
There are some differences between the accounts available via Akahu’s classic feed vs. those currently available via the new, open banking feed. The following account types aren't available for sharing at this stage:
The specifics may be different for your bank but currently, these accounts are not available via open banking.
- Managed fund
- KiwiSaver
- Foreign exchange (FX)
Foreign exchange being excluded means that only NZD-denominated accounts are supported via the regulated open banking system at this point.
Transactional, Savings and Loan accounts should all be available under open banking.
Akahu has great documentation outlining specific account exclusions in their documentation here -
We suggest going to your institution’s own Open Banking page if a specific account isn’t covered in Akahu’s documentation.
Note: ANZ bank-specific information
You must be 18 or older to share your accounts via the ANZ open banking feed.
To share any personal credit card account data, you must use the main account holder's login credentials. Additional or Joint cardholders cannot share credit card account data via open banking, even if the customer can access the account in their ANZ GoMoney app.
For ANZ business accounts (excluding business credit cards) & trust accounts, you'll first need to link them to your personal banking login. To do that, please follow the steps in this guide: Setting up ANZ Customer Select for open banking access. If you have any issues during the set up ANZ Customer Select, please reach out to ANZ directly for help on: 0800 269 249.
Troubleshooting Akahu feeds
On occasion, feeds encounter errors that are beyond our control. Errors are not commonplace, but unfortunately, they do happen!
Thankfully, the errors are temporary in many cases and can be resolved on the next sync or will resolve within 48 hours.
If you have an ongoing issue with a feed, click this link: Request feed help.
Learn more about getting help with feeds in this guide: Getting help for feed issues.