New Zealand will move to level 3 of lockdown on Monday, April 27 at 11:59pm. Alert level 3 will be held for two weeks and then Cabinet will assess whether to move down another level.
New Zealand's trading banks have provided businesses and consumers $7.5 billion in new loans since the country went into lockdown, with 13,559 business customers lent $5.5 billion and the balance going to 21,772 consumers.
Another 13,549 business customers have moved to either interest-only or reduced-principal repayments and interest on $17.4billion of existing loans with a further 3,053 businesses deferring all repayments on $1.6 billion of loans.
Another 589 business customers have had $0.7 billion of loans restructured, banker-speak for loans customers can no longer afford to repay on the original terms.
Among consumers, 43,962 have moved to either interest-only or reduced principal repayments and interest on $15.4 billion of loans and another 42,212 have deferred all repayments on $15.5 billion of loans.
These figures are published on the NZ Bankers Association website and will be updated each business day.
As yet, they didn't include any lending under the government's business finance guarantee scheme but those would be published, probably from next Monday, NZBA chief executive Roger Beaumont said.
"The BFGS has only been live for four working days," Beaumont said.
"We just thought it was important to be open and transparent about what we're doing. We knew there would be a lot of questions about what we were or weren't doing," he said.
NZBA viewed publishing the data as showing "how the banks are supporting customers and the economy at a very challenging time."
And publishing the data meant there was "a much more reliable and fact-based way of communicating rather than it just being anecdote-based."
And it surely is the case that anecdotes are starting to surface from businesses who are having difficulty accessing the BFGS, although that is at least in part due to businesses having unrealistic expectations.
A survey of bankers by economist Tony Alexander found many businesses weren't making use of the BFGS once they realised the government's guarantee of 80 percent of the loan is given to the bank, not the borrower, who still has the same obligation to repay.
Similarly, individuals interested in taking mortgage holidays had been deciding not to take them once they realised interest would continue to accrue.
The banks are providing their data to accounting firm KPMG – which has long published regular banking surveys – which will aggregate the numbers daily before passing them to NZBA to be published, so the NZBA won't be privy to any individual bank's figures.
