ANZ is making progress with the rollout of its potentially transformational ANZ Plus offering, but not all that much.
Total deposits on this new platform reached A$6.1 billion at the end of April, the bank said in its half year results for March 2023, released on Friday. This represents roughly five per cent of all ANZ retail deposits in Australia.
The bank said it had around 260,000 customers using the new app and, recently, more than a third of users have been new to bank.
This implies an average balance in the order of $24,000 per customer, and the bank said average balances lifted 51 per cent over the six months to March.
The conundrum for the bank, and even more so for its customers, are the consequences of inertia, disinterest or ignorance of the proposition underlying ANZ Plus.
As an inducement to customers to download and then activate ANZ Plus the bank is offering a competitive interest rate of 4.50 per cent on balances up to $250,000 managed through the Plus app.
The rest of ANZ’s transaction and savings client base is thus stranded with the perfectly usable, if ageing, legacy ANZ app – and often paid lousy interest rates.
“How sustainable is this?” Banking Day asked the bank on Friday.
“I want our customers on the classic app to move now, and take the high rate,” Shayne Elliott, the bank’s CEO responded.
“You’d expect us to have a hero product. We want it to be attractive.
“It’s clean and simple, so perhaps we don’t need to be as sharp on Progress Saver.
“It’s much better to put our money into ANZ Plus,” he said, adding that “the ANZ classic [app] rates well.”
Plus is the centrepiece of a busy ANZ agenda to not merely “reshape” the bank but to overcome its deficiencies as the smallest of the sector’s big four banks and better compete with its peers.
“We achieved more strategically in this half than in any half prior,” Elliott crowed on Friday, pointing to the bank’s transition (in early January) to a non-operating holding company (NOHC) structure as another milestone.