•    Most New Zealand banks fared well in Roy Morgan's consumer satisfaction surveys and interviews for the year to December 2018. Eight of the nine largest banks had more satisfied customers in 2018 than in calendar year 2017. TSB was the biggest improver (up 6.1 percentage points to 88.5 percent). The only major bank to show a decline in satisfaction over the last year was ANZ - down by 1.9 percentage points to 77.1 per cent. In the advocacy stakes (whether a customer would recommend their "main financial institution" to a friend or colleague) TSB on 89.9 per cent was the standout.•    Augmented analytics, along with "continuous intelligence" and "explainable artificial intelligence" are among a raft of potentially disruptive emerging data and analytics technologies to both aid and threaten the established order. Use of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, ideally in a real-time context, to automate and explain decisions are the next stage in data analytics, according to Rita Sallam, and Donald Feinberg, two Gartner vice presidents. Speaking at a Gartner conference in Sydney yesterday, they also hosed down hype over blockchain-based analytics warning that "… blockchains are a data source, not a database, and will not replace existing data management technologies." And, as if on cue, Finextra is reporting that Sberbank, one of Russia's largest retail banks, claims to have developed an algorithm that "acts like a data scientist", creating its own models to solve application tasks.