📬BNZ Achieves Milestone in Open Banking with API Standards Compliance

BNZ is the first bank to have reached the mark set up by Payments NZ—it has already achieved its aggressive target in a major milestone.

The Details:

BNZ has adopted the Payments NZ Account Information API v2.1 standards that allow New Zealanders to securely share their financial information with accredited providers in the conduct of open banking. The standards ensure customers have full control over their data sharing in terms of who to share it with and the ability to stop doing so.

Making sure standards are adopted means that Payments NZ has required New Zealand's major banks to establish Account Information API v2.1 standards by November 2023, coinciding with the deadline until May 2024 for APIs to support direct account payments initiated through third-party applications.

BNZ has achieved this in 2023, and already, with more than 250,000 customers, the first benefits have been realized from innovative services such as Xero, Volley, and Blinkpay connecting into BNZ through secure APIs.

Such real-time access to financial data enables other companies and FinTech to provide a wide array of financial personalized products and services, from tools that can handle budgets and plans for saving money to detailed information and applications for loans with strong methods for fraud detection and prevention.

The Consumer and Product Data Bill, now being considered by Parliament, will put this Consumer Data Right into action and make it easier to share consumer data across open, different sectors.

Why this matters:

Open banking initiatives, such as that of BNZ, become essential in competition, innovation, and enabling a customer to access full potential in the financial industry. They enable customers to safely share their financial data in order to provide customized solutions designed for a single person. They add to better customer experiences and a greater ability to collaborate between traditional banks and fintech firms for ongoing improvement.

Bottomline:

Customer Data and Product Bill will provide the pathways for the same initiatives in other sectors of the economy. In turn, customers will benefit from this in terms of increased choice and personalized services. This ushers in a more transparent and customer-centric economy, in which data application immensely improves people's lives.