by Jenny Ruth
While it uses the supermarkets to market its services and uses Westpac Bank’s branches as an agency, it is essentially a "virtual" bank, operating through telephone and the internet rather than a branch network.
James Munro, Superbank’s chief operating officer, won’t say exactly when Superbank’s mortgage product will be launched except that it will be "soon" and about the middle of this year – any day, in fact.
Superbank launched its first product, "Super Saver," in February last year. It offers term deposit standard interest rates, currently 6%, combined with no minimum investment, no fees, no fixed terms and instant access to your money without penalty.
The current advertising slogan for the product is: "have your cake and eat it too."
Munro says Superbank now has in excess of $180 million in deposits and is targeting $250 million by its balance date of September 30. While he won’t say how many Super Saver customers the bank has, he says it signed up 362 new customers in the last seven days. That was an exceptional week and the more average number of new customers a week is between 250 and 300.
Between 85% and 90% of Super Saver accounts have positive balances and of those, the average balance is more than $20,000, Munro says.
Not surprisingly, given the nature of the product, Superbank’s major customer group is aged between 45 and 65 years, (he says there isn’t any gender bias) with the next biggest customer group being those over 65.
Nevertheless, Munro reckons the fledgling bank is still only scratching the surface of the potential market, given that there is currently between $48 billion and $49 billion in term deposits.
But the Super Saver isn’t the bank’s only product currently; in August last year it conducted a "soft launch" of a transactional account – a chequing and EFTPOS capable account. This features a flat monthly fee of $10.99 a month for balances under $1,000 and $7.99 for larger balances. The only additional charges are for dishonoured cheques, a cash handling fee for cash deposits larger than $2,000 a month and a 50 cent fee per transaction for using ATM machines.
Munro says Superbank isn’t actively promoting the transactional account yet. " We felt we had to have that product before we had a home loan," he explains.
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