Bank plans fee for rival ATM use

By Deborah Diaz

WestpacTrust plans to charge its customers when they use a rival bank's automatic teller machine (ATM) - and other banks could follow suit.

An ASB Bank representative said last night that the ASB could not rule out imposing the extra charge.

Until now the name of the bank on the hole-in-the wall has not made a difference to most customers.

Banks have levied the same charges for ATM transactions, ranging from the National Bank's 25c to the BNZ's 50c, irrespective of which ATM was used.

However, the banks paid for the customers' convenience, reimbursing each other between 50c and $1 if a customer used another bank's machine.

WestpacTrust is looking to recoup those costs, and from October using another bank's machine will cost its customers 85c compared with 35c for the bank's own.

David Tripe, the director of Massey University's Centre for Banking Studies, said he would expect banks to start charging.

"It makes sense. It costs them money when their customers use other banks' ATMs."

An ASB spokeswoman, Barbara Chapman, said Westpac's move meant it was no longer a level playing field and ASB might have to follow suit.

The bank would have to do some calculations and study the impact of the Westpac move.

BNZ, ANZ and the National Bank said they had no plans to follow suit.

WestpacTrust, the country's largest bank, has been building its network of ATMs and will have 500 by the end of the year, which is about 100 more than its nearest rival.

A spokeswoman, Jane Anderson, said the bank believed the network was large enough for its own customers to "easily avoid" the extra charge and did not expect to lose business.

From October, the bank will also increase its Eftpos fee by 10c to 35c and its fee for manual transactions from 50c to 65c.

Customers with account balances of $5000-plus or business with the bank worth at least $40,000 (including mortgages) will receive 20 free transactions a month instead of five.

Dr Mark Colgate, a senior marketing lecturer at Auckland University specialising in consumer banking issues, said the ATM charge was a step in the wrong direction in terms of convenience.

The charges could hit some customers hard, particularly if they could not choose between ATMs.

Some people might change banks as a result of the new charge but New Zealanders generally had a "huge amount of inertia" when it came to changing banks.