We’re pleased to announce v2.0 of our API standards for Payment Initiation and Account Information are now available in our API Centre sandbox, which is powered by Middleware NZ. This means API Standards Users and Community Contributors can now test their innovations against the latest version of our standards.
Our v2.0 standards were published in May, and having them now in the sandbox makes the standards even more tangible, allowing developers to test that their solutions function as expected against the APIs.
V2.0 of the standards are an upgrade from v1.0, and continue to promote ecosystem efficiency, safety, security, and innovation. V2.0 includes some great new optional functionalities for enduring payment consent, which is unique to New Zealand, and decoupled authentication flow.
Using our API Centre sandbox
Our sandbox contains all current versions of our API standards and acts as a model bank. It offers an independent, secure, and risk-free environment for developers to experiment, innovate, test, and learn using common specifications and requirements.
Those signed up to our centre as either a Standards User or Community Contributor can use the sandbox to ensure their products meet technical requirements, without having to first negotiate terms of access with a bank.
Using our sandbox also means a significant portion of your solution can be built and tested to common specifications. Then from a technical perspective, once a Third Party Standards User has a bilateral partnership in place with an API Provider (a bank), they only need to focus on integration and testing specific to the provider and can begin performance testing. This helps to simplify the technical set-up and configuration process.
How to get into the sandbox
Any developer or organisation with a genuine business interest in the standards can register as a Community Contributor to start using our sandbox. There’s currently no fee for the first 12 months of being a Community Contributor*.
Community Contributors also have the advantage of getting closer to our API Centre work. They receive updates about our standards, and can read and comment on ‘release candidate’ versions of APIs via the centre’s collaboration platform, Confluence. Being a Community Contributor is also a pathway towards becoming even more involved with the centre at a later stage as a registered Standards User.
Coming up on the horizon
The sandbox release of the v2.0 standards is only part of a greater body of work the centre is doing. We’re continuing to work on a development pipeline of other API standards and iterations.
We’re also working on other initiatives such as customer experience guidelines to support the use of the standardised APIs in market and refining our work programme over the next 12-18 months. And we’re continuing to work with API Providers to understand and share their technical and bilateral partnering readiness timeframes for v2.0 in market.
*Offer valid for applications received before 29 April 2021. Terms and conditions apply.