{"id":600669,"date":"2026-09-15T02:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T02:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/600669\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T02:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T02:48:09","slug":"banks-pass-on-more-ocr-increase-to-borrowers-than-savers-fma-data-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/600669\/","title":{"rendered":"Banks pass on more OCR increase to borrowers than savers, FMA data shows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">New data from the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) shows that home loan borrowers on variable interest rates have felt the full impact of the most recent official cash rate increase &#8211; but savers have not.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">The FMA has been tracking interest rate changes and the time taken for them to affect new and existing customers with floating rate mortgages and on-call accounts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">It said it requested information from eight financial institutions that provided 98 percent of the housing loans in New Zealand.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Its data shows that all banks passed on at least the entire q25 basis point official cash rate (OCR) increase of earlier this month to their floating home loan rates.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">The Co-Operative Bank passed on slightly more.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Banks have also <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/business\/890537\/bnz-increases-home-loan-rates\" class=\"underline-brand-hover visited:text-foreground-secondary hover:visited:text-foreground-primary\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">increased their fixed home loan rates<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">On-call savings accounts received an increase of anything from nothing at ASB to five basis points at ANZ, through to 20 basis points at The Co-Operative Bank.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Savers received less of an increase this time than they did at the last OCR review.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub described it as a &#8220;sad state of affairs&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;It&#8217;s a worry that people have so much money in term deposits. Why do they bother? Park it in a conservative fund.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Gareth Kiernan, acting managing director and chief forecaster at Infometrics, said floating rates were now comparable with what they were before the Reserve Bank cut the official cash rate from 3 percent to 2.5 percent last October.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;Whereas the OCR is currently lower, at 2.75 percent. The savings rates were less responsive on the way down, so I&#8217;d expect them to be less responsive on the way up as well, particularly when the OCR is still reasonably low.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">&#8220;However, in general the deposit rates are still slightly below where they were before the October 2025 cut &#8211; so there seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between how savings and mortgage rates have evolved over the last year. It might be that, because there&#8217;s not a lot of demand for borrowing at the moment due to the soft housing market, banks have a relatively good supply of deposit funds coming in, so they don&#8217;t the need to try and entice more funds in the door by pushing up deposit rates.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">When the Reserve Bank updated the OCR, it urged banks to lift term deposit rates. Its data shows one-year term deposit rates are paying an average 3.94 percent, up from 3.85 percent in June and 2.79 percent a year earlier.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">Eighteen-month term deposits are paying an average 4.13 percent from 3.86 percent a year earlier.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">But six-month term deposit rates have barely moved this year and at an average 3.55 percent are down from 3.88 percent in August last year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\">This week, ASB senior economist Chris Tennent-Brown said one-year term deposit rates were at an average of 3.9 percent, compared to a low of 0.75 percent in 2020 and 2021, and a high of 6.1 percent during 2023 to 2025. &#8220;We think the bias will be up for the shortest terms and expect the longer-term rates to remain around current levels.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"[&amp;_em]:font-serif-text-italic [&amp;_cite]:font-serif-text-italic\"><a href=\"https:\/\/rnz.us6.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=211a938dcf3e634ba2427dde9&amp;id=b4c9a30ed6\" class=\"underline-brand-hover visited:text-foreground-secondary hover:visited:text-foreground-primary\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sign up for Money with Susan Edmunds<\/a>, a weekly newsletter covering all the things that affect how we make and spend money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New data from the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) shows that home loan borrowers on variable interest rates have&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-600669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600669","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=600669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}