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Piggy bank
With BenBank, banking finally makes a leap into the 21st century (Image: Getty/Tina Tiller)

OPINIONBusinessNovember 15, 2022

I would simply fix banking in New Zealand

Piggy bank
With BenBank, banking finally makes a leap into the 21st century (Image: Getty/Tina Tiller)

Duncan Greive argued that banks don’t need a social licence to operate. Ben Gracewood asks: what if they had one though? 

Banks desperately want you to care about their brand. They spend millions of dollars on TV commercials with weird monsters in an effort to make you feel something, anything, when you see their red or blue or yellow logo.

Constrained by a combination of regulation and market forces, they all offer the same products at the same prices with the same parameters. Which bank you join is largely just luck: which branch was nearest when your parents were setting up your first account, or which banker happened to say yes first to your eye-watering mortgage request.

If a $10m ad campaign means you’re 0.01% more likely to choose the bank with the kid looking at a watch in a store window when choosing between identical mortgages with identical interest rates, then it’s money well spent. Money that might otherwise have gone towards lowering your interest rate.

Bankers are so enamored with their brands, they truly believe that the vibe attached to their logo matters, and will survey the market regularly to check how people feel, or which logo comes to mind when you’re asked on a random phone call to recall “a bank”.

What they don’t ask in those surveys is “how badly do you want your bank to get the fuck out of the way?”

An artist’s impression of BenBank’s API (Photo: Getty Images)

If I was the boss of a bank in New Zealand, I would simply deploy the very best banking API, eliminate marketing spend, reduce products to a few simple options, and then sit back and make all the money. The BenBank API would let anyone with permission make payments and transfers, create and update accounts, confirm receipts, download transactions, and the rest. It would also provide identity verification (in line with anti money laundering laws) and allow new account creation.

The API is free to use. Or perhaps developers can get 0.05% of any fees and interest they bring to BenBank in return for adding a “powered by BenBank” logo somewhere on the login screen.

Here’s what would happen with BenBank over the next six to 12 months:

New Zealand’s best developers and designers would build mobile apps and websites to interact with BenBank. These apps would look better and be infinitely nicer to use than any of the bank apps you use today, because the best designers & developers do not currently work at banks the environment that bank developers and designers operate within is not set up to produce great apps and websites.

Companies like Apple, Stripe, PocketSmith, and Akahu would integrate deeply with BenBank, bringing products like the Apple Card and P2P payments to market, and driving innovation between the API consumers of BenBank.

Entrepreneurs would innovate on top of BenBank’s API, creating products like micro payments, daily rent payments, instantaneous finance assessments, and ideas that are impossible to think of in our current environment, because banks are stagnant and cannot innovate.

The flood of customers to BenBank would cause panic across the industry, and other banks would race to implement similar APIs, which would further expand the range of products and processes available to kiwis. New Zealand’s free and fast interbank settlements are a huge advantage that is currently barely exploited – in a New Zealand future where every bank has an API, we get instant* P2P payments with zero interchange fees.

*Yes, bank nerds: clearing would take longer but the API could easily confirm available funds and receipt of transfer.

A couple of years after BenBank launches, you buy a Coke in a dairy by grabbing it from the fridge then walking out. Everyone has a location-based payments API on their phone, so the dairy owner just taps the icon on her phone to extract a payment from the one other phone that is currently present in her store. The APIs do the rest.

BenBank books a $2 billion dollar profit and no one gives a shit because BenBank is cheaper to use than any other bank and everyone loves the user experience. In other words, BenBank has a huge amount of social licence and people are happy to pay for it.

Keep going!
Is petrol going the way of the dodo? (Image: Dot Loves Data)
Is petrol going the way of the dodo? (Image: Dot Loves Data)

BusinessNovember 14, 2022

Is the petrol car as dead as the dodo?

Is petrol going the way of the dodo? (Image: Dot Loves Data)
Is petrol going the way of the dodo? (Image: Dot Loves Data)

New research shows the breathtaking speed with which New Zealand has adopted low emission vehicles, with one expert predicting EV registrations will overtake petrol cars in less than a year. Justin Lester runs the numbers.

Do you have an EV? If not, it’s probably just a matter of time. New analysis by the data science company Dot Loves Data, where I’m government director, shows the sun is clearly setting on fossil-fuelled motor vehicles. New Zealand new sales of low emission cars are skyrocketing and will overtake petrol and diesel sales as early as the middle of 2023, a fundamental tipping point in consumer purchasing behaviour. Petrol cars may soon be at risk of becoming museum pieces and modern-day fossils, much like the fuel that powers them.

Our analysis is based on the soaring growth of low emission car purchases. In 2014 there were fewer than 100 EVs registered in New Zealand. By 2018 there were 4123. In the first nine months of 2022 the number shot up to 13,034. Hybrid car sales are even higher, with close to 5000 new hybrid vehicles registered in September 2022 alone.

Where is the growth coming from?

The 2022 growth has been driven by three factors: the introduction of the government’s clean car discount scheme, the popularity of the new Tesla models, and the continuing decline in popularity of petrol and diesel cars, which have been steadily declining since late 2017.

In one last fit of rebelliousness, 15,295 more petrol and diesel cars were purchased in March 2022, compared with the monthly average, to avoid paying the high emissions vehicle fee introduced on 1 April, dubbed a “ute tax” by opponents of the scheme. The exhaust-fuelled high did not last, with the sale of petrol and diesel cars dropping by a third since April.

Conversely, sales of low emission vehicles have increased by 31% since the scheme’s introduction.

Data scientist Ben van Noorden predicts the registration of low emission vehicles will surpass those for petrol and diesel vehicles by the middle of 2023, a fundamental tipping point in the motor vehicle industry. Any future move to abolish the clean car discount would, according to van Noorden, be a backward move and leave New Zealand to “choke on its exhaust fumes”.

Van Noorden points out that “peak exhaust” was reached in New Zealand in October 2017, when monthly sales of fossil-fuelled passenger vehicles topped out at 22,494. This has steadily declined to the extent that 10,033 fossil-fuelled vehicles were sold during September 2022.

The second factor driving the sales of EVs has been the popularity of Teslas and the lower-cost Nissan Leaf. Nissan Leafs led the burst of EV sales from 2015 in the face of little competition from other vehicle makers. Tesla took pole position in 2021 with the release of the Model 3 and subsequently Model Y into New Zealand.

New movers are the Chinese owned BYD and MG, with the Tesla Model Y, the BYD Atto 3 and the MG ZS leading sales in September 2022, with the Nissan Leaf falling away. Extraordinarily, the Tesla Model Y outsold every other vehicle in September, finishing ahead of the Ford Ranger and Toyota HiLux.

Who is buying low emission cars?

Wellington tends to be the catalyst for social change (think nuclear free or LGBTQI+ rights) and it’s no different for low emission vehicle purchases. Five of the nation’s top 10 sales areas are in the Wellington region, followed by Christchurch, Auckland, Queenstown and Dunedin.

While low-emission sales are increasing in every part of New Zealand, the lowest per capita uptake is in the rural, lower-income areas of Wairoa, Kawerau, Otorohanga, Waitomo and South Waikato. According to our data, 637 out of every 10,000 Wellingtonians now own a low emission vehicle, while in Wairoa 74 residents do, highlighting the current barriers of rurality and lower incomes. We expect this will change as used low-emission vehicles soon enter the market.

Dot Loves Data’s analysis shows low emission vehicles are becoming increasingly mainstream. The early adopters of EVs were predominantly low deprivation, progressive, green-voting, urban dwellers. Since the introduction of the clean car discount, Labour voting areas are increasingly EV-centric, while the negative association with EVs in National and ACT voting areas is much less pronounced.

The analysis suggests fossil-fuelled cars will soon go the same way as cigarettes and cheese hedgehogs. Where both were once fashionable, their decline was hastened by the social stigma attached to them. Based on the current consumer purchasing behaviour trend, it is likely similar societal pressure will marginalise petrol car ownership.

In 2023 new low emission vehicle sales will outpace that of fossil-fuelled cars. As used low emission vehicles enter the car market, the current consumer trend indicates it will only be a small number of years, rather than decades, before fossil-fuelled cars are themselves modern day fossils.


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