He said the rate had previously been in a \u201cno man\u2019s land\u201d between Kiwibank and the other major lenders \u2013 not the cheapest on offer, but not the most expensive either.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy have your floating rate lower than the bulk of your competitors? Just quietly put it up and go \u2018We may as well just take a bit more profit\u2019. It\u2019s as simple as that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cunningham said all other major influences on home loan rates had remained the same since ANZ last changed its floating home loan rate on November 26, so it seemed that market conditions were the sole driver of the move.<\/p>\n
He said it would also help to fund the bank\u2019s 1.5% cashback offer for new home loan customers, which had been extremely popular. One Squirrel customer had received more than $30,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor mortgage brokers it was sort of a gold rush, almost everyone that had the opportunity took it … even as mortgage advisers, where we see a lot happening, we were pretty gobsmacked when we saw ANZ come out with that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said banks were now competing with cashback rather than better interest rates, which meant those who did not move missed out.<\/p>\n
Customers should \u201cplay the game\u201d when they could and move banks to earn cashback when it was available, he said.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for ANZ said it was committed to offering competitive home loan rates.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince the OCR began to fall in August 2024, we\u2019ve lowered our floating rate by 2.95 per cent, more than any of the other main banks.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn Tuesday, we announced a small change to our floating and flexi rates to align with market conditions.<\/p>\n
\u201cAhead of the November OCR cut, our floating rate was already below most of the main banks. Our new rate remains competitively positioned among the main banks in the market today.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll continue to review rates as global and local conditions evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cunningham said the New Zealand banking system was hard to break into because the existing banks could adjust prices across their range to alter what profit they made.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve always got a bunch of products you can compete to protect your margin.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhereas if you\u2019re a mono-line provider and the competition turns to fixed-rate loans and you haven\u2019t got a floating rate loan to subsidise it or a credit card or a personal loan at a high margin or cheap deposits to subsidise it… that\u2019s why the system is so resilient against attackers.\u201d<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He said the rate had previously been in a \u201cno man\u2019s land\u201d between Kiwibank and the other major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":241535,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[85917,8831,18464,138,813,1601,27308,44192,78,12469,17768,117,111,139,69,5340,19257,812],"class_list":["post-241534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-12m","tag-an","tag-anzs","tag-business","tag-edmunds","tag-expert","tag-extra","tag-floating","tag-in","tag-interest","tag-means","tag-new","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-profit","tag-rate","tag-susan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=241534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=241534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=241534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=241534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}