ASB has only 370 distressed home loan customers

“We're still seeing that customers are resilient. We're working with 370 customers who really need support and different solutions,” Shortt told GoodReturns after the bank released its first-half results.

These support measures include making mortgage payments interest only or allowing interest payment holidays.

The reason why so few customers require such support is “we've been really careful in that low interest rate environment to make sure that we've used high test rates,” Shortt says. These are rates used to test whether a customer could afford to pay a higher interest rate.

Shortt says 68% of customers are paying interest rates above 6% and that includes 36% of customers paying interest rates of more than 7%.