A complaint is when a customer tells a bank that they are dissatisfied with the bank’s product, service or staff, or the way the bank has handled a complaint. The customer must also expect a response or resolution.

The dashboard displays complaint information from banks who have supplied data. Banks are at different stages of data collection with some banks still developing their systems to meet the dashboard requirements. This means some information, like customer satisfaction, may be incomplete.  Please treat this information as indicative only.

We continue to work with banks to improve the complaint information they collect.

Banks deal with hundreds of thousands of customers and process millions of transactions each day, and so it is inevitable that sometimes things will go wrong. What matters is how they are put right. Banks recognise that complaints are an opportunity to learn and therefore they are taking a more expansive view of complaints. High complaint numbers may signal a strong commitment to capturing and learning from complaints, no matter how small.

We will be keeping an eye on whether the number of complaints changes over time.

The dashboard is interactive: you can hover over the graphs or click on different products or issues for more information. For example, you can select the product you are interested in, and the graphs will change to provide more details about that product.

Sharing complaint data is a big step toward greater transparency and accountability. It helps customers know what to expect when they have a problem with their bank, and allows banks to identify areas to improve their service. The purpose is not to compare banks to one another. Direct comparisons might not give an accurate indication of service levels because banks vary in size, ability to capture complaints, and they offer different products to the public.

Over time, we have added extra information to the dashboard:

• Information about industry complaints dates back to January 2020.
• High-level information about each bank’s complaints dates back to October 2020.
• Detailed information about each bank’s complaints dates back to January 2022.

The “Complaints by Bank” page shows high level information about how many complaints each bank receives, how many are resolved and how quickly they are resolved.

For each bank, you can click to see more using the button above the table. The page gives insights into the particular products, services and issues which caused complaints at that bank, along with how well those complaints were resolved.

Direct comparisons might not give an accurate indication of the quality of a bank’s service, because banks vary in size and offer different products to the public.

Deciding who to bank with is an important and personal choice. There are lots of factors to consider, such as the financial products offered, their customer service, their technology, their fees and more. How a bank handles complaints is only one small piece of the puzzle, so we don’t recommend choosing a bank based solely on the dashboard information.

When comparing bank data, we need to ensure we are comparing like with like. A larger bank will have more customers and can therefore expect more complaints. This is why the dashboard compares a bank’s actual complaints to a weighted average of the complaints received across the industry.

The weighted average lets you compare the number of complaints a bank has received to the number of complaints you would expect for the bank, based on the bank’s size and the complaints reported by other banks.

A bank’s market share is its financial assets as a proportion of the total banking sector.

Since 2022, Kiwibank’s market share has been adjusted (increased by 5%) because, uniquely, Kiwibank has so many customers relative to its assets. This adjusted market share is therefore a fairer measure of Kiwibank’s market presence. To enable this adjustment, a single percentage point has been taken from each of the four biggest banks’ market share.

The market shares displayed on the complaints dashboard do not add to 100%, as currently not all New Zealand banks are providing data to the dashboard.

We ask banks to tell us whether customers were satisfied with the outcome of their complaint. Some banks ask their customers directly, while others decide based on how the customer communicated with them.

Both methods have their pros and cons, and we support banks using either method. Due to the differences between the methods, survey data and staff assessed data should not be compared to each other.

For each bank, we highlight upward and downward trends in complaints. We show the banking product or issue which, statistically, has had the most significant change since last quarter.

Please email us if you’d like to know more about our statistical methodology.