Banks: your new best friend

Given the reality of the situation, Inwood sees the banks' need to portray themselves as "warm and friendly and loveable" as curious and possibly even self-defeating.

"It causes this thing in people's brains that the psychologists will call cognitive dissonance.

"The more that the banks say 'we're lovely, nice and friendly' and the more you don't experience those things, the more that everything they say becomes suspect."

His company's research suggests that when it comes to banking, all customers really care about is price and ease of use.

"Everything else is largely irrelevant. Do you think anyone actually really believes banks are interested in them and want to actually help them?"

If his comments regarding the major banks appear somewhat uncharitable, bear in mind he started up non-bank mortgage lender Wizard Home Loans, which was in direct competition with them.

His company's finance industry blogsite, burningpants.com, is a reference to the "liar liar" refrain, "because one of the things banks do is they tell lies pretty persistently".

Talking about ASB's "Kiwi bank" advertising, Tripe is more circumspect than Inwood would be.

"It's interesting but not very true," he says. "One of the interesting things we found out when we did some survey work was that a significant proportion of people believed ASB was a Kiwi bank, but they are not and we shouldn't kid ourselves."

Tripe, a generally well-informed and balanced commentator on banking industry issues, was showing some signs of frustration with the quality of financial information provided by Westpac this week in its full year results, labelling some numbers "scurrilous and nonsensical".

The lack of clarity in financial information supplied to their New Zealand stakeholders is hardly likely to change his view expressed a day or two earlier that sometimes the banks "have not been as sensitive to the way in which the public might perceive them as they might have been".

"They have at times been a bit ham-fisted, careless, and not as attentive to the public as they could be or should be," says Tripe.

There are clearly now signs they are currently "trying to bolster, repair, or remedy the perceived deficiencies in their public image.

"Every now and then they have a burst of thinking their public image is not so good and they'd better do something about repairing it.

"They do some good work for a while and then they lapse back into clumsy arrogance again."