Some banks took up to five weeks to lift mortgage rates after the latest OCR hike
New Zealand's major banks varied sharply in how quickly they passed on the Reserve Bank's latest official cash rate rise to borrowers and savers, according to newly published Financial Markets Authority (FMA) data marking a full year of OCR pass-through tracking.
A year of tracking bank behaviour
Following the RBNZ's decision to lift the OCR by 0.25 percentage points to 2.75% on 2 September, the FMA collected updated interest rate data from the eight banks that together provide about 98% of New Zealand's housing loans: ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Kiwibank, SBS, Westpac NZ, The Co-operative Bank, and TSB.
The regulator has repeated this exercise after every OCR review over the past 12 months, publishing the results a week after each announcement to help borrowers and savers compare how quickly their bank moves on rates and to encourage banks to reflect on fair treatment of new and existing customers alike.
Existing customers often wait longer than new ones
The latest figures show floating mortgage rates rose between 0.25 and 0.35 percentage points across the eight banks following the September OCR decision. Kiwibank was quickest to move for new customers, lifting its variable rate within five days, while BNZ took the longest at 15 days. The gap widened further for existing customers: ASB and Westpac updated existing floating mortgage rates within eight days, while SBS Bank took 36 days, more than a month after the OCR announcement, to apply the change to its existing residential customers.
On-call savings accounts told a similar story, with some banks, including ASB and SBS, choosing not to lift their savings rates at all despite the OCR increase, while Kiwibank and The Co-operative Bank moved within days.
With a full year of data now collected, the FMA says it is working to make this information easier to compare across banks ahead of future OCR reviews.
For advisers, the disparity in timing between new and existing customer rates adds another factor worth flagging to clients weighing refinancing options or negotiating with their existing lender.
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