Building ‘guanxi’ for your business

Photo: Alpha Group General Manager Maggie Chen and BNZ Commercial Partner Franky Wang exchange mooncakes.

Jamie Rihia, BNZ’s Head of Growth Segments, explains the importance of the Mid-Autumn Festival in Chinese culture and how kiwi businesses can start to build valuable relationships in the Chinese market.

This year, the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival (or Mooncake Festival) takes place on October 4th, marking the time of year when the moon is at its fullest and brightest. It is the second most important festival to Chinese people after Chinese New Year, and is traditionally a time for honouring deities, ancestors and uniting families. Continue reading…

Celebrating Te Reo Māori

In the light of Māori Language Week, Cath Lomax, BNZ’s Head of Diversity & Inclusion, shares her personal experiences around Te Reo and how the Māori culture is brought to life at BNZ.

With Māori Language Week coming up I thought it would be an interesting exercise to see how many Māori words my kids could come up with. They started off pretty well covering all the basics, and then the competitiveness came out with them counting up to 100.

It seems so natural for our kids to be learning and speaking some Māori at school now, although I wish even more was being done. Continue reading…

Celebrating three years of fair loans for our communities

BNZ’s Head of Community Finance, Frances Ronowicz, reflects on three years of providing affordable loans in a successful partnership with the government and not-for-profit organisations.

Elsie’s got $80 more a week in her family budget after receiving a Community Finance loan for home appliances. Les has independence in his retirement now that he could buy a reliable car with his loan funds. Aayla can get her kids to school and herself to university with the car she bought with her loan.

Our Community Finance initiative is three years old now and these New Zealanders are among hundreds who have benefitted from an affordable low or no interest loan, where the alternative could have led to an unsustainable debt situation. Continue reading…

Turning bad debts into good habits

Director of Retail and Marketing Paul Carter shares how BNZ’s Community Finance programme helps people be good with money so they can do great things with it. Not just through the low-interest loans, but also through the conversations held.

It’s Money Week and the official theme is “What does debt do for you?”.

This got me thinking about what debt has done for me and my family. Continue reading…

Hold the phone! The future of mobile payments

In light of the latest Android Pay developments, here’s more on the future of mobile payments from Ross Jackson, BNZ’s Head of Cards & Payments.

Recently I read an article captioned “Plastic will be the death of cash” on LinkedIn. That’s partly true, as it’s not plastic that will displace the hassle and costs of securely handling cash, it’s the (16) digits that carry the transaction that are about to change the world of payments for New Zealanders and their favourite retailers. Continue reading…

BNZ Business Essentials ready to support your business

BNZ’s Head of Small Business, Harry Ferreira, announces the launch of BNZ Business Essentials, a platform offering support services for SMEs at a discounted rate.

We’re continuously firing out tips to help people save money and of course we’re always thinking of how we can make things easier for our customers.  Continue reading…

Ten years of KiwiSaver, where to from here?

Donna Nicolof, BNZ’s Head of Wealth and Private Bank, reflects on ten years of KiwiSaver and looks forward into the next decade, identifying a number of changes that could be implemented to generate even greater benefits.

It’s been ten years since the launch of KiwiSaver, which was introduced on 2 July 2007 to get New Zealanders into saving and better preparing for their retirement.

There’s certainly a lot to celebrate with this birthday. Continue reading…

Life as a BNZ Graduate: Margaret’s story

Meet Margaret, who joined the BNZ Business Banking Graduate programme in February 2017. In part two of our ‘Life as a BNZ Graduate’ series, Margaret reflects on what she’s learnt over the last few months and her favourite parts of the grad programme. 

“My name is Margaret and I’m currently a Corporate and Commercial Banking Graduate at BNZ. I started this programme in early February 2017, having graduated a couple of years ago with a BA/BCom conjoint majoring in Finance, Economics and Japanese. Continue reading…

Creating great together with BNZ’s new careers site

BNZ Sourcing and Branding Manager, Caroline Peak reflects on the launch of BNZ’s new careers website and life at BNZ.

We recently launched our new and improved BNZ careers website and are happy to announce, just over a week in and close to 10,000 visits later, it’s going strong! But it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it’s something we’ve been planning for a while, so we knew we had to get right. Continue reading…