Consumer NZ says BNZ could do more

Bank of New Zealand could be doing more to compensate customers who lost access to their money on Saturday for several hours, says Consumer New Zealand.

The BNZ has said it will work with customers who experienced a “direct financial loss” outage to ensure they are not out of pocket.

But those who couldn’t pay for groceries or petrol because their cards wouldn’t work may get nothing.

A BNZ spokesman said it would work with any customer who experienced direct financial loss.

“We will work with them to ensure they are not financially impacted. Customers should get in touch with us and we will look at each case on its merits.”

But Jessica Wilson, Consumer New Zealand’s head of research said the bank could be doing more to compensate its customers.

An offer like a small amount of credit as compensation for the inconvenience of the service being out would be appropriate, she said. “Most of us rely on using cards.”

Wilson said people who only had accounts with the BNZ would have had no other options for paying by card.

Wilson said she wasn’t aware of any other major outages by the banks recently.

Other industries like the power and telecommunications industries have compensation requirements if they don’t fulfil their obligations for a certain amount of time.

The BNZ spokesman said the problems were caused by an outage at one of the Melbourne systems areas for the National Australia Bank — the bank’s parent company.

He said it caused a series of failures on both sides of the Tasman.