New Data Connections Partner: Akahu

Note: Data Connections is now live and all new feeds are automatically added via the Data Connections platform — you do not need to get in touch for testing. For information on open banking in Australia, please check out our Basiq blog post.

Providing reliable ASB bank feeds has often been a challenge. Our customers with ASB have experienced outages spanning multiple months, with frequent changes and upgrades to the ASB online banking site resulting in interruptions to feeds.

These ongoing challenges prompted us to accelerate the integration of Akahu, a new data partner. Akahu is a New Zealand-based finance platform that makes it simple for you to access the data that organisations hold about you, via trusted third parties like PocketSmith.

We decided to only support connections to ASB via Akahu initially, as the need is greatest for those users. Additionally, only supporting a single bank allowed us to focus — meaning we could release much faster than otherwise. Support for other banks will be coming soon, keep an eye on your in-app messages for when this happens!

What’s great about connecting via Akahu

The experience of using Akahu for ASB connections in PocketSmith is — without any hyperbole — amazing. Because of the way that Akahu connects to your bank, it’s a whole new world. Here’s what you can look forward to:

1. More reliable feeds as technically, if your bank’s mobile app is functional, then your bank’s connection to PocketSmith via Akahu will also be functional. This reflects our experience so far too.

2. Near real-time transactions meaning if a transaction is posted and appears in the mobile application, it’ll appear in PocketSmith the next time you sync your connection. Even better, you’re able to sync every 10 minutes with Akahu!

3. Correct ASB home loan account transactions. ASB has always been an oddity in the way home loan account transactions would show, and the team at Akahu have solved this with transactions that fully represent all movements of money.

Caveat: pending transactions not yet available via Akahu

There is one thing to be aware of when you connect to ASB via Akahu: pending transactions will not yet appear. We believe pending transactions only exist for credit cards and debit cards in ASB, however they won’t show up in PocketSmith yet.

On balance, this is a small issues in contrast to the overall benefit you’ll see from moving to Akahu for ASB feeds. Their team are working on pending transactions at the moment, and improvements should be released soon.

Getting set up with Akahu

I migrated a PocketSmith account to Data Connections and linked up with ASB via Akahu, taking a screencast of the process. That video is below, which gives a clear idea of what to expect when connecting to ASB via Akahu.

We’ve also got a Learn Center article which goes through what to expect when migrating your ASB connection to Akahu, so please check that out if you have any questions.

Next steps from here

The next step will be opening up the ability to connect to all New Zealand banks via Akahu, which we expect will happen in the next couple of weeks, before the end of the Data Connections beta.

We’re really excited about introducing Akahu, as it brings us closer to the future of you being able to easily access your banking information in near real time, with reliable end-to-end technology. We can’t wait until all our New Zealand users are connecting via Akahu, a milestone which is now just around the corner.

James is the CTO and co-founder at PocketSmith. He loves tech from software to hardware to music, and is passionate about technology being a net-positive in people’s lives. He lives off-grid with two humans, two axolotls, two rabbits, one dog, and too many possums.