Kia ora tatou and welcome to the first issue of NZBN News. Along with www.nzbn.govt.nz this is our way of letting you know what is happening with the New Zealand Business Number (NZBN) and its programme of work.

The NZBN is a key initiative of the Better for Business programme. NZBNs are new unique identifiers assigned to businesses in New Zealand. The NZBN will reduce the time and energy businesses spend providing government the same information in different ways. In the future a change to NZBN information will change the same information on other databases held by government.

In July we launched the NZBN register through www.nzbn.govt.nz. Over time the register will electronically collate primary business data for all kinds of businesses in New Zealand.

At the moment every company registered in New Zealand has a NZBN. If legislation is passed this year we will, by the end of 2016, allocate NZBNs to other kinds of businesses such as sole traders, partnerships and incorporated societies.

To ensure the initiative has the support of the whole public sector, departments and other Crown entities have been consulted with about recognising the NZBN in their systems, and later the possibility of integrating it into their business. We have just finished our first round of consultation with 186 government agencies about that government directions process.

In 2014 a Research NZ business survey highlighted several points of frustration that business wanted government to fix. One of the key findings from this survey was that businesses found themselves having to provide the same basic information to government and councils over and over again.

The ultimate goal of the NZBN programme of work is to get to a stage where business need only tell government that information once. And when that information changes they only have to advise government of the change in one place.

In the next NZBN register release we will be making available a set of APIs (web services) which will enable registered businesses to:

• Update their primary business data
• Subscribe to a watch list for businesses and receive notification when those businesses make changes to their primary business data.
• Request and receive bulk downloads of business data

If you would like to trial the APIs at any stage please contact us.

When Air New Zealand wanted to launch a new Airpoints programme for businesses in New Zealand they researched how to enable self-service registration. 

Air New Zealand’s Head of Customer Loyalty, Mark Street says a requirement of the programme design was to enable automatic validation removing any need for an Air New Zealand employee to manually complete registrations. 

“Ensuring self-service capability to manage the Airpoints programme is fundamental to the customer experience.  We just needed a unique, credible and reliable identifier to make the process work.  The NZBN fitted the bill”

Air New Zealand launched Airpoints™ for Business in September 2015 and built the NZBN number and company name into the registration process as mandatory fields.  

Using a Companies Office API a business was immediately validated to complete registration automatically.

Mr Street says the process is fast and reliable and fits Air New Zealand’s “keep it simple” approach to dealing with businesses that are time poor and want to do things with the least administrative hassle.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s new website to enable those working in the IT space to find out about and access its APIs (application programming interfaces).

A recent article in New Zealand Food Technology News about the value of the NZBN.

The highlights of the first R9 business-government accelerator day.

Do you have a good NZBN story to tell? Do you need to know more? Contact us at anytime.