ANZ’s independent rate decision turning off customers: Roy Morgan

Larry SchlesingerDecember 8, 2020

ANZ’s customer satisfaction ratings as measured by Roy Morgan fell for the third straight month in April, after the bank decided in January to make an independent interest rate call on the second Friday of every month. 

The bank’s retail customer satisfaction rating fell 1.9 percentage points during April to 75.5% to be behind both NAB (up 0.2 percentage points during April to 77.7%) and the Commonwealth Bank (up 0.2 percentage points to 77.2%). 

Westpac was the other major bank to register a drop in customer satisfaction during April, falling 0.5 points to a customer satisfaction rating of 75%. 

ANZ’s satisfaction rating has fallen 3% over the past three months – double the pace of falls in satisfaction for any of the other the big banks in the same period. 

The bank announced its decision to go it alone on interest rates in December and made its first out-of-cycle rate increase in February of 0.06 percentage points followed by the same out-of-cycle increase in April. 

In May, the bank passed on 0.37 percentage points out of the 0.5 percentage points on offer from the Reserve Bank following its May 1 rate decision. 

Norman Morris, a director with Roy Morgan Research, says the main reason for the large drop in satisfaction by the ANZ is its “out-of-cycle home-loan increase in February, which it initiated and was followed by the other major banks”. 

ANZ bank came under fire from Marcus Padley, founder of the Marcus Today stock market newsletter, earlier in the month. Padley said the bank was getting “a lot of flak for no upside”. 

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ANZ’s decline among retail customers has been matched by falls in satisfaction among business customers, with the percentage of customers who say they are fairly or very satisfied with the bank falling from 65% to 63.9%. ANZ is ranked third among the big four. 

Among business customers, Westpac is the clear leader of the big four at 66.8% satisfaction, ahead of NAB (64.9%) with the Commonwealth Bank last at 61.7%. 

The overall customer satisfaction rating for banks declined marginally from a February high of 66% to stand at 65.1% in April. 

Queensland bank Suncorp has the highest business customer satisfaction ranking at 67.8%, followed by St George at 67.5%.

 

 

 

 

Larry Schlesinger

Larry Schlesinger was a property writer at Property Observer

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