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10:37 am, August 28th, 2026 - 5 comments
Categories: economy, nicola willis, Privatisation -
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Kiwibank are proposing to buy TSB Bank, before Heartland get it.
IMHO this is a very big piece of business for any government entity to undertake while an election campaign is underway. National’s Minister of Finance Nicola Willis supports this acquisition, telling The Post that shareholding ministers had tasked Kiwi Group Capital with looking for “growth options that would enable the bank to play a more competitively influential role in the sector.”
Kiwibank is important as a sustained policy intervention into the entire national banking market. In case we need a reminder, Kiwibank is one of the Clark Labour governments’ successful anti-oligopoly market interventions, back in 2002. So 24 years later it’s very interesting to see this otherwise hard monetarist Minister of Finance seek to build on longstanding Labour policy.
Some here may remember the sorry 1980s era of seeing our mortgage payments go otherwise overseas after our homegrown regional savings banks were restructured and sold off, when the regions had built that wealth up for over a century.
And lest we forget how multiple regional banks were merged into Trust Bank, which they then sold to Westpac for a mere $1.2 billion.
And then ASB Bank was sold off to Commonwealth Bank. ASB taught me to save as a child with its Kashin the Elephant piggybanks, which I filled and took up to the counter with an actual banking passbook and got stamped.
To be really clear: in banking, loyalty matters quite a lot, because loyalty is a key element of trust.
Then finally there’s the last two local owned regional banks remaining: TSB and Southland.
If Kiwibank pull this purchase off, they would have a new combined asset base of about $54 billion which still makes it a distant fifth in the New Zealand market. Westpac is the smallest of the Big Four holding roughly $130 billion. But it solidifies their position.
It’s also a good fit because there are no Kiwibank branches in Taranaki. So they also gain customers in that region.
If any other party wants to regain the glories of the BNZ (with all its many late 1980s faults), then any future form of government should support growing Kiwibank.
A successful purchase would be a strong signal that a 2026-2029 future government understands it can deliver greater banking competitiveness, greater local wealth growth, greater public dividends back to the public purse, and a stronger demonstration to citizens that market interventions against the oligopolies really do work.
Got an email this very day from TSB saying their owning trust is going ahead with the Heartland merger. Does Kiwibank's proposal predate that?
Ah well they were too late then.
It was bullshit anyway. A campaign bribe, it was National that sold off the rest of the ones we owned and they have been trying to flog off Kiwibank for years. Liars and arseholes.
I went to open a Kiwi Bank account yesterday. I followed a women who swiped he bank card into the Hastings branch about 10.30 am. There were no lights on, or people present in the banking chamber. The foyer was filthy and the ATM was out of order. I got a bank account at ANZ.
'And lest we forget how multiple regional banks were merged into Trust Bank, which they then sold to Westpac for a mere $1.2 billion.'
An unfinished sentence there, perhaps…?