by Steve Wiggins
1 December 2025
We’re pleased to announce that we have entered into a standards licensing agreement with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Hīkina Whakatutuki to support regulated open banking going live today. We welcome this new chapter for the open banking journey in Aotearoa New Zealand and will continue working closely with the ecosystem toward outcomes that best serve customers and the market.
Our agreement ensures continuity by allowing MBIE to incorporate by reference the API Centre’s version 2.3.3 API standards for data, payments, and API security as well as our Customer Standard v1.1 into the Customer and Product Data (Banking and Other Deposit Taking) Standards 2025. While not included in the regulatory standards taking effect from December 1, the licence agreement also includes our Performance Standard v1.0, for future consideration to incorporate.
We’re confident this provides the open banking ecosystem in Aotearoa with consistency and certainty, ensuring clarity and industry and market alignment. We look forward to working with our Standards User community, including banks and fintechs, as we settle into this new regulated environment.
Our role remains to coordinate open banking activities across the ecosystem to ensure the industry’s efforts are well-sequenced, considered and strategically aligned with the best market and customer outcomes.
What’s next for the API Centre?
Looking ahead to 2026, we have a busy work programme and will continue leading industry collaboration to deliver our roadmap, a new conformance assurance framework, and the next iterations of our standards.
Our focus remains on governing, developing, and managing the API standards and implementation framework that enables safe, secure open banking in Aotearoa.