Banks: your new best friend

BNZ kept a skeleton staff this week so 3500 staff members could help with community projects. Photo / Martin Sykes

You may have noticed the big Australian-owned banks trying to cuddle up to you lately.

In one television commercial a big clumsy Westpac guy, prompted by wordless admonitions from a bunch of everyday Kiwis, eventually does the right thing by going to some inconvenience to retrieve his discarded icecream wrapper from the sea.

ASB Bank, on the other hand, is trying to convince people it is one of us, running adverts telling us it has been a "Kiwi bank" since 1847.

This week BNZ was "Closed For Good", running a skeleton staff to look after its banking business for the day while 3500 of its employees were out doing good deeds in the community.

"Banks just genuinely believe that we need to be a part of the community," says BNZ head of external communications Diane Maxwell.

"And if we're going to be a part of the community we need to do stuff that is tangible rather than just say it. Closed For Good was very tangible."

Maxwell points to recent comments from Cameron Clyne, formerly BNZ boss but now chief executive of parent National Australia bank, suggesting that the current hostility towards major Australian banks was not tenable for viable businesses.

Clyne's comments acknowledged there had been a loss of customer trust in the big banks, says Maxwell, "and we need to work hard to re-earn that trust".

She points to a "general kind of global loathing of banks as a result of the financial meltdown" which had spread to New Zealand, even though none of the banks here have had controversial taxpayer-funded bailouts.

However, that's just part of "a really messy mix" of factors including the subsequent recession, increasing redundancies, fees - including the anger-inducing early repayment charges imposed for breaking fixed-term mortgages - the massive "structured finance" tax cases, and state-owned Kiwibank being "a bit relentless" in its nationalistic marketing.

A well-seasoned spin doctor with banking industry experience says bank bashing is largely a pro-cyclical phenomenon.

"It's always easier in the good times," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But when the big wheel turns, various commentators look around for someone to blame and the banks always cop a lot in that respect.

"You do see a lot of scrutiny of things like break fees, regular fees, interest rates - do they go down as quick as they go up? All those things become magnified in an environment where the economic wheel's turned."