Kiwibank turned on full open banking for both personal and business customers on Thursday morning, becoming the first New Zealand bank to do so across every customer type, and locking in a permanent decision to charge fintech partners nothing for standard data requests.
The state-owned bank launched on 28 May 2026 with three local technology firms as its first ecosystem partners, Wych, Akahu and Volley. The move lands four days before Kiwibank’s formal regulatory designation under the Customer and Product Data Act 2025 kicks in on 1 June, and roughly six months ahead of the December 2026 deadline for customer data sharing.
Kiwibank Chief Executive Steve Jurkovich said the bank was leaning into its position as a challenger. "As a smaller player compared to the larger banks, we’re excited to partner with fintechs to drive more competition to make Kiwi better off," Jurkovich said. "We see the significant value open banking can deliver for our customers and we want to enable that," he said. "That’s why we won’t be charging accredited third parties to make standard API requests." In a further comment, Jurkovich said, "By removing cost barriers we’re helping to unlock innovation that puts customers first – enabling more tailored, transparent, and empowering financial experiences."
That stance puts daylight between Kiwibank and the other domestic banks. ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac have all introduced fee waivers, but each one is time limited. ANZ is waiving account information fees for twelve months from April 2025. ASB ran a waiver through to December 2025. Westpac is waiving fees for new partners for twelve months. BNZ has held off formally waiving but offers free access while fintechs build. Kiwibank is the only bank with a permanent zero fee commitment.
The regulated fee caps Kiwibank has chosen to forgo are modest in unit terms, five cents per payment initiation call, one cent per account information call, capped at five dollars per customer per month, but they sit at the heart of the wider competition question. The Commerce Commission’s final report on personal banking, released on 20 August 2024, found the big four did not face strong competition and made fourteen recommendations, all accepted by the Government. Faster, frictionless open banking was the lever the Commission identified for breaking that grip.
Wych, the open data infrastructure firm sitting between Kiwibank’s application programming interfaces and the wider fintech ecosystem, will be doing much of the day to day plumbing work. Chief Executive Dermot Butterfield said the partnership was a win for local capability. "We’re proud to be supporting a Kiwi technology company and leveraging the expertise we have right here in New Zealand," he said in the Kiwibank announcement.
Wych raised a $1.5 million seed round and already holds API services contracts with Kiwibank, ASB and Westpac. Akahu, the open finance aggregator that connects fintechs into bank data, told media earlier this year it has 122 organisations and products accredited to use its connectivity in production, with 78 already migrated to the regulated regime and 26 more in transit. Akahu also processed New Zealand’s first regulated open banking home loan applications. Volley is using the version 2.1 and version 2.3 Payment Initiation specifications to automate flows for several bank clients.
The technical stack underneath all of this is set by the API Centre, a division of Payments NZ, which writes the standards now referenced into the Customer and Product Data (Banking) Standards 2025. Big four banks went live with version 2.3 Payment Initiation by 30 May 2025 and the matching Account Information specification by 28 November 2025. Kiwibank’s own industry deadlines are exactly twelve months later for each.
Kiwibank Chief Customer Officer Mark Stephen, speaking to RNZ, said the "open" in open banking pointed to a category of services that did not yet exist. He framed the launch as being about giving customers more choice and helping foster innovation in the financial sector.
For consumers and small businesses, the practical change is incremental rather than overnight. Open banking means a budgeting app, a payments tool, a mortgage broker or an accountancy platform can ask permission to read your transaction data or trigger a payment from your account, then act on it without you having to log in and copy details manually. It is the rails the Government and the Commerce Commission have decided are the most realistic way of injecting competition into a sector dominated for decades by four Australian owned banks.
Some of what those rails will eventually carry is already in market. Since the big four went live in December 2025, a small but growing cluster of products has appeared, low cost merchant payment buttons built on Payment Initiation, expense and tax automation tools that fetch transactions for sole traders, and account aggregation dashboards that pull balances across multiple banks into a single view. The Akahu processed regulated home loan was a proof point that one of the highest friction banking transactions in the country can be done over the new pipes. Kiwibank’s launch widens the addressable customer base for every one of those products by roughly 800,000 personal accounts and a sizeable slice of the small business market.
What changes today is that those rails now run through a fifth bank, a New Zealand owned one, and that the toll on those rails has been set, by that bank, at zero.
Have you tried any of the new open banking apps yet? Tell us in the comments what worked, what didn’t, and which features you’d most like to see fintechs build next.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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