Open banking arrival means third parties can help with budgeting, loans and power bills - Diana Clement

Open Banking New Zealand’s rollout of mandatory open‑banking APIs, which will let third‑party providers access consumers’ transaction data for budgeting, loan comparisons and power‑bill optimisation, marks a watershed moment for the financial services web ecosystem. For website owners, especially those running fintech comparison sites, budgeting apps, or utility‑cost calculators, the new data rules mean a surge of legitimate AI‑driven bots that will query banking APIs on behalf of users. These bots will generate high‑volume, low‑latency traffic that mimics normal user behaviour, increasing the risk of false positives in security tools and potentially skewing analytics if not properly identified. Moreover, the ability to feed real‑time transaction data into AI models raises compliance concerns around data privacy and consent disclosures on your site. **Actionable tips:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to include the official Open Banking API endpoints (e.g., `https://api.openbanking.nz/*`) and label them as “trusted‑bot” sources, ensuring crawlers like Googlebot know these calls are legitimate. 2. Deploy a **behavior‑based bot‑tracking solution** that distinguishes API‑driven requests (consistent header patterns, OAuth tokens) from malicious scrapers, and whitelist the identified third‑party providers. 3. Add a **real‑time consent audit log** on your site that records when users permit third‑party AI tools to access their banking data, and expose this log via a secure endpoint referenced in your llms.txt so compliance bots can verify your adherence to the new regulations.