Big four rated negatively by mortgage customers: Roy Morgan

Big four rated negatively by mortgage customers: Roy Morgan
Prateek ChatterjeeMarch 14, 2017

Mortgage customers’ satisfaction with the big four banks was in the negative and lower than non-mortgage customers, according to latest data from leading market research company Roy Morgan.

Despite some tentative signs of improvement in satisfaction among the big four’s mortgage customers in January, overall they remain well below the satisfaction levels of the smaller banks’ mortgage customers, according to Roy Morgan.

The research looked at the ‘Net Promoter Score’, that measures advocacy levels among mortgage customers.

All four — Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and NAB —  showed improved satisfaction among their home-loan customers in January but only the ANZ improved over the same time last year.  

ING Direct tops on the list of satisfied mortgage customers (of the 10 largest banks) with 96.3 percent, followed by Bendigo Bank on 93.2 percent. These two remain well clear of the field, with the next best being Bankwest (85.9 percent) and Bank of Queensland (82.5 percent). 

Among the big four, CBA has the highest mortgage customer satisfaction at 79.7 percent while Westpac has the lowest  at 75.4 percent.

Overall, satisfaction level of the big four banks’ personal customers in the six months to January 2017 was 80.1 percent, up fractionally on 79.9 percent in December.

The best performer among the big four with regards to mortgage customer NPS was the CBA (minus 12.7), followed by ANZ (minus 13.8), Westpac (minus 20.4) and NAB (minus 20.7). 

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Bendigo Bank was the best performer when it came to NPS among the top 10 banks, scoring (plus 32.3). Banks with the highest mortgage customer satisfaction scores also had positive NPS scores for these customers, the research noted.

“Despite home loan rates having been low for a considerable time, it is somewhat surprising that mortgage customer satisfaction remains lower than that of other customers, who are likely to be adversely impacted by low deposit rates,” said Norman Morris, industry communications director at Roy Morgan Research.

“The smaller banks have shown that it’s possible to achieve much higher satisfaction levels among mortgage customers than those achieved by the majors, even though they’re operating in the same interest-rate environment.”

Roy Morgan says its extensive modelling goes deeper than just looking at recent events such as adverse publicity and interest-rate movements, which are generally short-term impact on satisfaction and advocacy levels, and the research firm relies on more than 50,000 interviews p.a covering all aspects of financial behaviour.

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