Ginny Anderson

Morning, Heather.

Well, look, it's not a bad thing, and it has the potential to be a good thing.

But in terms of our banking market, it's not really going to be a transformational thing.

So if we merge TSB and Heartland, we're talking about making a bigger bank, but to give that a bit of scale, it's going to be still less than half the size of Kiwi Bank.

So it's not exactly going to be transformational in terms of banking services for New Zealanders.

Well, I mean, there's two ways to get a challenger bank in this country.

I mean, one is to get a really big, innovative bank come in, you know, with deep pockets and big pools of capital and completely shake up the market.

But the more likely path and the thing that we've seen overseas is that we'll get these new fintechs coming through.

You know, so these are the really nimble, fast-moving, innovative guys who completely rethink how banking should work.

And we do have a few of those in New Zealand.

My favorite at the moment is a crowd called Emerge.

And they are the kind of guys who, rather than sort of moving at the slow speed of, you know, traditional banks, they'll get the market shaken up by innovating.

You know, eMERGE is sort of releasing new products every couple of weeks, right?

And we just don't see that from old-style banks.

So with the best will in the world, TSB and Heartland, you know, they're really not in that innovation space.

Yeah, look, both TSB and Heartland seem to have a very good reputation for customer service, and I think that is a huge contrast with the big four Australian-owned banks.

So, yeah, that focus on the regions, the focus on better customer service, the focus on doing things well, all of those things are incredibly welcome.

This is a funny sort of a thing, really, because, look, it is a sensible way to fund the Reserve Bank's operations.

But the thing we have concern about is that it's being levied equally on all the small banks.

And, you know, the Reserve Bank really does seem to hate the small banks.