South showing resilience in harder times, ANZ says
Southland is maintaining “an underlying story of resilience’’ in tougher times, according to the ANZ’s new managing director of personal banking, Grant Knuckey.
“That’s not to say there aren’t people who are struggling, because there are, everywhere in New Zealand,’’ he said during a visit to Invercargill.
“But, as a proportion, less so here.’’ The bank had about 34,000 personal customers in Southland of whom about 18% were current Home Loan customers.
Knuckey said there was a big difference in how many Southlanders were behind in their payments or in a hardship process compared to places like Auckland.
“That’s generally true of Southland through economic cycles,’’ he said. ”You don’t have the amplitude of peaks and troughs’’.
Southland’s median mortgage size was $430,000 compared to Auckland’s $1.05 million – so the manageability of servicing that debt was different during times of higher interest rates.
And, on average, first-home buyers in Auckland borrowed more than twice what a first home buyer in Southland borrowed.
The business community was also showing resilience, Knuckey said.
“It’s still difficult, there’s still belts being tightened. There are still layoffs occurring in Southland as they are everywhere – but not to the same degree as we’re seeing in other parts of the country,’’ he said.
Knuckey himself, though based in Auckland nowadays, has strong southern banking links. His dad Eric met his mum Jan (nee Buchanan), when they were both working in the Gore branch of the BNZ, where he had been transferred from Winton. His grandfather Jack Buchanan ran Gore’s Atlantic service station .
Within the industry, over-the-counter transactions were dropping and now 62% of the bank’s customers were deemed digitally active in their use of internet banking and the GoMoney app.
But the bank was committed to maintaining regional branches as they were “for the next few years at least’’.
Knuckey said there would always be a role for branches, though that role would continue to change and it was already different from what it had been five years ago
He acknowledged the bank’s more than $2 billion profit in the 2022-23 financial year was “a big number’’, but said the bank was a big company with a balance sheet of $200 billion of assets and $150 billion of lending.
It was also by far the biggest corporate taxpayer in New Zealand at $830 million, and many Kiwisaver members were shareholders who profited from the dividends.