Face-to-face time limited for banks

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Banks are having increasingly limited opportunities to deal face-to-face with new customers, says TSB  managing director Kevin Murphy.

Monday, November 11th 2013, 3:52PM 1 Comment

by Susan Edmunds

His bank has announced it will be the first to use the RealMe service.

The ID service was developed by NZ Post and the Department of Internal Affairs to securely prove a person’s identity remotely.

Murphy said it would transform the online and mobile services TSB offered clients and would be used at first to allow customers to open a new account without having to provide information such as a driver’s licence or passport.

“Under the pilot we’ll be running, new customers will be able to download our [my]bank App to their smartphone and use it to sign up for a bank account with a few taps on their smartphone rather than having to supply us with copies of ID or come into a branch, making the process much easier for both parties.”

He said it was an ideal opportunity to grow the customer base, without customers having to worry about bringing in physical copies of their identification to a bank branch.
New Zealanders were becoming a lot more confident about conducting their banking business online, he said. “People do still have reservations but as we progress more and more to an online basis, this will become more popular.”

Murphy said the recent introduction of loan-to-value restrictions had not been significant for TSB. “It hasn’t had the impact it might have done on the other players. High-LVR lending was not a part of our core business and we haven’t had to pull back on any preapprovals.”

He said lending had been monitored but there had been no additional issues in the first month of the restrictions.

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