Kiwibank is going from strength to strength having announced a $36.m profit for the past year. That's up 19% on last year and Kiwibank says that is actually an 82% increase due to changed rules requiring last year's profit to be restated.I moved my accounts to Kiwibank a few days after the ANZ, who I have dealt with for 23 years, announced they were sending 500 back office jobs to India.
Bad enough we are now scorched earth for manufacturing, but to loose clerical jobs to India in large numbers would ultimately gut our economy.
One of the interesting things I learned while working at IBM a few years back was that banks make 80% of their profits from the top 20% of their clients. In those days, they made mothing at all from the bottom 20%. Hence the move to much higher bank fees. For a huge chunk of relatively low-income banking customers, those fees are the only profit the bank makes from dealing with them.
This triggered the move toward setting up Kiwibank. It was essentially intended to offer banking services to that botttom 20% (and anyone else) who want banking with lower fees. It was also intended to exert downward pressure on the fees other banks could charge without losing customers.
Having spent 6 months in Canada last year "enjoying" the much higher banking fees they pay to their large banks, the value of Kiwibank to every NZ banking customer - whether they deal with Kiwibank or not - is very obvious to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for deciding to share your thoughts here. In commenting on this blog, you can express any opinion you like, though any opinion expressed should make some attempt to be consistent with verifiable reality. Say what you like, confident that I won't delete any comments that are polite and respectful of me and others who may comment here. Civility aside, SPAM comments will be deleted if only because they are usually far too long and selling rubbish anyway. (Comments on posts older than 30 days are moderated. I'll approve them as soon as I can.)