BANKS

WHICH IS THE BEST VALUE FOR MONEY BANK IN NZ?

Thats a tough one to answer. It depends what you are looking for in a bank really.

National Bank offer good interest on your account, have low fees (or no fees if you have over $5000 in your account) but their mortgages and credit cards aren't the best.

Kiwibank offer the best mortgage rates (or they'll beat any rate you find!), are very local being situated in a lot of post offices, they also offer a good credit card, but their fees are quite high for everyday banking (unless you have over $4000).

Westpac have been given a 5 star rating for their mortgages, but thats about all I could say about them. High everyday banking fees and high rate credit cards.

ANZ (Australia & New Zealand) Bank is pretty similar to National Bank, as they now OWN National Bank!

BNZ (Bank of New Zealand) only seem to offer anything decent if you are under 30. But even then, their details on their website dont make it look too appealing!


Just as a note, when I say everyday banking fees, you should be aware that you get charged for paying with cheques (50c with Nat. Bank), using your EFTPOS card (25c per transaction with Nat. Bank), making deposits or withdrawals in the branch and using cashpoint machines, on top of which you will pay a $3 monthly fee to keep your account open!. So as you can see, banking is an expensive hobby here, unless you have over $4-5k you can leave in your bank account (or you can opt to pay a monthly fee of around $15 to waive transaction costs).

We're with National Bank at the moment and their service has been excellent, but we may consider a switch to Kiwibank when we look at buying houses etc to get the better mortgage rates.

Don't you get international banks there like HSBC etc. I notice oin the Open2View site. Lloyds do all the currency converting and have banners all over it.

HSBC have a presence here somewhere, but I've never seen them

The bank that looks like Lloyds is The National Bank, who used to be owned by Lloyds before ANZ bought them out. They are allowed to use the Lloyds logo for another 2 years, and then will be changing to ANZ (so the guy in the bank told me!)

Was interested to read these post regarding banks. I currently bank with HSBC in the UK, doing most of my transactions online - had a guess at the web address and got lucky.

Did a search for branches - they only have 5 listed and they are all in the Auckland area.

web address is www.hsbc.co.nz

Aslo found this on the uk site which may be worth looking at as another option: http://www.offshore.hsbc.com/hsbc/ma...move-overseas-

That's cool then, I bank with HSBC.

Thank you all, some good sound advice :045: