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
I was one of the complainers on that post, and I have also passed on my complaints to Westpac. I am now actively looking at switching banks because of this, and am deciding between Kiwibank or BNZ. Kiwibank seem to be quite progressive (see their iPhone banking interface?) and have fewer fees, so am currently leaning towards them.
I operate a BNZ and an ASB account and have found BNZ Internet Banking terrible in nearly every way. ASB is miles ahead. However BNZ has exceptional customer support via email…so the shortcomings of their Internet banking (such as not being able to alter an automatic payment online) can be quickly and easily solved by a human. Imagine that!
Is it me or does the law of two feet rarely play a part with banking, people seem very reluctant to switch, I’ve switched my personal bank accounts since coming to NZ, started off with HSBC (as i was and still am a HSBC customer in the UK) but their online solution in NZ is the worst I’ve ever seen or had to use, which is strange considering they’re the least present of NZ banks. I then switched to ASB, and am very pleased with their solutions, and they don’t charge through the nose, coming from the UK it seemed to me very strange that banks charge you to have an account with them, and give them your money to loan out at an increased rate of interest, while not really providing interest on the current account you set up.
However too many people are still with the banks they went with as a child/student, and while complaining about costs/fees they never actively switch.
We need to encourage people to walk out on bad banks and into good ones.
[...] About Rowan « Xero Bank Feeds [...]
I’ve now got my Westpac Feed live in my Xero account, it’s been a long time coming and great to finally have… I’m sure Xero have been trying their hardest to get Westpac on board. I can’t wait to also have Westpac Mastercard feeds so I’m not still downloading/uploading statements, it kind of defeats the purpose to have one and not the other so my excitement was short lived :(
But they told me they are working on it so that’s great. They said they are also in the final phases of testing their new manual bank reconciliation functionality, sounds good but I don’t actually know what that means?! :)
@Dylan
I suspect that you wouldn’t need to search to hard to find a disgruntled customer from ANY bank you choose to investigate. I’ve been an ASB customer ever since they offered me a free account when I was a university (with a brief stint as a BankDirect customer, simply because they offered black VISA cards which looked cool, although BankDirect is also ASB-owned). So, I’m not exactly in a great position to judge any of the others.
@Owen
Yeah, I agree with you. To suffer in silence is the kiwi way, don’t you know! To be fair, as I said above, it’s sometimes a case of the devil you know, as the alternatives are not necessarily guaranteed to be better. But it doesn’t hurt to ask the question. In the UK the banks are not allowed to charge transaction or account fees BY LAW, so that limits their options. They make it back though with other misc. charges – for example, it doesn’t pay to lose your ATM card, it will cost you one arm + one leg to get a replacement.
@ Jonathan
Manual bank reconciliation is just a fancy-pants way of saying “balancing your bank account without downloading transactions from your bank”.
There are a few scenarios where this might be useful – for example if your bank doesn’t provide a download in the correct format, or if the transactions you want to reconcile are too old to be able to get them from the bank.
All internet banking sites are pretty rubbish, at least to help you manage your money. Thats why I made http://www.33percent.co.nz. Its in Beta so I’d love some people to have a play.
I’ve sorted out auto bank feeds (via BNZ PC banking) and it makes life so much better. I have access to ANZ, BNZ, Westpac, and National bank (still working on ASB).
Seriously, there is no comparison between auto feeds and manual uploads. If you use Xero (or 33percent!) sign up for the auto-download option.