When we started building SortMe, open banking wasn't just a nice feature on the roadmap — it was central to why SortMe needed to exist at all. I saw two technologies converging at exactly the right moment: AI, which could finally deliver the hyper-personal experience money management demands, and open banking, which would make rich, real-time financial data available to build on. Together, they could unlock something that's never really been possible before: a money app that genuinely understands you.
New Zealand has taken a while to get here. But we're here. And it changes things.
What open banking actually means (in plain English)
Open banking sounds technical, but the idea is simple: it's a regulated framework that lets you choose to share your banking data — your transactions, balances, account details — with third-party apps like SortMe. The key word is you. You decide what gets shared, with whom, and when. And you can revoke that access at any time.
Before open banking, your financial data lived inside your bank — and it largely stayed there. Banks had little incentive to open things up, and no regulatory requirement to do so. If you wanted a budgeting app to see your spending, you were often uploading CSV exports or relying on unofficial workarounds.
Open banking changes the equation. It gives banks the infrastructure — and the obligation — to let your data move where you need it to go. It means apps like SortMe can build on enriched, structured, bank-quality data rather than working around a system designed to keep everything locked in.
Why NZ took so long — and why it matters that we're finally here
I'll be direct: New Zealand banks have held Kiwis back for years. Financial data has been trapped inside institutions more interested in protecting their own ecosystems than enabling the kind of innovation that would genuinely serve their customers.
Other countries — the UK, Australia, much of Europe — have had open banking frameworks for years. The innovation that followed has been significant: better budgeting tools, faster mortgage comparisons, smarter lending decisions. Kiwis have largely missed out on that wave.
The regulations that came into force in late 2025 change that. This isn't just a compliance tick — it's a structural shift in who owns your financial data. The answer is: you do.
What actually happened when the big four banks went live
ANZ, ASB, BNZ, and Westpac were scheduled to have their open banking APIs live by December 2025. In practice, there were delays, and the APIs were delivered in February and March 2026.
I won't pretend that wasn't frustrating. It was.
But here's what actually matters: these are now the official bank connection APIs. The banks themselves support, maintain, and service them. That's a fundamentally different thing from the connection methods that existed before.
For SortMe users, that shift means something real: the data pipeline connecting your bank to your SortMe account is now backed by your bank's own engineering and security teams. It's not a workaround. It's the officially supported channel.
What this means if you use SortMe
SortMe connects to your bank via Akahu, our connection partner. Akahu is the layer that integrates directly with each bank's APIs and delivers your transaction data in the format we need to make SortMe work.
For most users, the experience of connecting your bank account hasn't changed dramatically — the flow is familiar. What has changed is what's powering it underneath, and what that enables going forward.
There is one new thing to be aware of: under the open banking framework, bank connections need to be re-authenticated every 12 months. You'll be prompted when it's time. It takes a couple of minutes and keeps your connection secure.
The bigger picture: open banking gives SortMe access to richer, better-structured data from your bank. Combined with the AI at the core of SortMe, that means a progressively more personalised experience — one that understands your actual spending patterns, your financial rhythms, and what a useful insight looks like for you specifically. Not generic advice. Yours.
Is it safe to share my banking data with SortMe?
This is the right question to ask, and I want to answer it directly.
First, the regulatory piece: any business accessing your banking data via open banking must be accredited by MBIE. That accreditation process exists specifically to ensure apps handling your financial data meet required security and privacy standards.
Second, and more practically: the official bank APIs mean your bank is now an active participant in this ecosystem, not a passive one. They're monitoring how accredited third parties access data, and they've built consent management directly into their systems. Your bank knows you've connected SortMe, and they've made it easy for you to revoke that access whenever you want.
Akahu — the intermediary we use — has been purpose-built for the NZ market with exactly these concerns in mind. Your bank credentials never pass through SortMe. The connection is read-only: it sees your transactions, not your ability to move money.
The short version: the system is designed around your control. You grant access, you can revoke it, and every party in the chain is accountable.
One thing every SortMe user needs to do right now
If you're currently using an older bank connection in SortMe, you need to migrate to the new open banking connection.
The legacy connection methods that existed before the official bank APIs are being turned off. When they go, if you haven't migrated, your transaction data will stop flowing into SortMe.
Migrating is straightforward: head to your connections in SortMe, follow the prompts to reconnect via the updated flow, and you're done. It takes a few minutes and everything carries over.
Don't leave it. The whole point of SortMe is that it works continuously in the background, automatically sorting your spending so you don't have to think about it. A broken connection is the one thing that stops that from happening.
When I started building SortMe, I made a bet that open banking and AI would arrive in NZ at the same time — and that when they did, there would be an opportunity to build something genuinely new. Not just a spreadsheet with a nicer interface, but a money app that understands your finances as well as you do, and often better.
We're at that moment now. Open banking is live. The data infrastructure is real. SortMe was built for exactly this — for every Kiwi who's tired of managing money on the back foot.
