It’s great to see that all of the major NZ banks are now providing automated bank feeds for Xero customers.
When I was working at Xero the percentage of bank accounts that were setup to receive automated feeds was one of the metrics we watched closely and were actively trying to increase – the user experience when your bank transactions just appear ready for reconciliation each day is just SOOOO much better than having to manually upload them yourself. So, I’m sure the team will be really excited to have all of these banks online now and will be working hard to convince customers to take advantage of this feature.
If you’re a Xero customer and you’re not using automated feeds, there is some more information about how to set these up in the help.
Reading the comments on that post it would seem that Westpac, the last cab off the rank and over a year or more behind some of their competitors, have decided to charge their customers $25 for the privilege of setting up each account on the feed. If that’s true it’s a really dumb decision from them in my opinion. Any excuse to clip the ticket, it would seem.
No surprise then that Westpac has been consistently last in recent customer satisfaction surveys, with around 30% of their own customers saying they were not satisfied with their overall relationship with the bank in the latest one. Wow! Despite this they recently announced a profit after tax for the six months ending 31 March 08 of $244 million (about $1.3 million per day), so Westpac customers can at least be reassured that their setup fees are contributing to a good cause I suppose.
If you’re a Xero customer and this fee is enough to convince you to switch banks, then it looks like BNZ would be a good choice as they are currently the only bank providing feed data for all types of accounts, including credit cards.
Related posts:
- Who owns your bank transaction data?, 12 Aug 2007
