Independent New Zealand lawyer Andrew Hooker, Slater and Gordon and Litigation Lending Services (LLS) have announced they are funding a class action lawsuit and hope to gather the names of more than 100,000 bank customers who have been charged more than NZ$1 billion in "exception fees" for dishonoured payments by New Zealand's banks."If you fail to pay your credit card on time or you accidentally overdraft your account, the bank will smack you for a fee on top of the interest they'll charge you," said independent New Zealand insurance and banking lawyer Andrew Hooker, who is fronting the class action in New Zealand.Banks charge between NZ$15 to $25 for these dishonour fees, yet, Hooker said, the true cost for reversing such transactions is a fraction of this."Those fees are illegal. They're called penalties because they don't accurately reflect what the cost is to the bank," Hooker said.The class action lawsuit was launched by Hooker, Slater and Gordon and Litigation Lending Services at a news conference in Auckland on Monday, along with the launch of a website aimed at gathering customer names (fairplayonfees.co.nz). The news unleashed a wave of media coverage, including stories on the main nightly current affairs programs, on talkback radio and online.Hooker said the class action was targeted at all New Zealand banks, not just the Big Four Australian-owned banks, which face similar legal action in Australia. Kiwibank was among the worst offenders, he said. NAB's BNZ was the "least worst" offender because it had unilaterally dropped dishonour fees on cheque accounts in 2009, but it had retained them on credit card accounts.The "fairplayonfees" lawsuit will be run on a no win no fee basis, with the litigation funders collecting 25 per cent of any amount awarded. Hooker told Banking Day that Slater and Gordon and LLS had set up an initial litigation fund of NZ$3.5 million and had set a minimum threshold for sign-ups in the "tens of thousands".Hooker said the initial response after the website had gone live at 1pm New Zealand Time had been "ballistic". He said the early sign-up rate had been faster than that seen at any equivalent time in the class action law suit against the banks in Australia. Technically, the action is not a class action as New Zealand law does not have the same facility for class actions as Australian law. A class action law is before the New Zealand Parliament, but it has yet to progress. Hooker said the action is termed a "representative action" under current High Court rules. If successful, this would be the biggest such action in New Zealand history.Hooker said the NZ$1 billion estimate for fees paid over the last six years was one compiled by the Australian funders using Australian data and extrapolating that to New Zealand given the relative sizes of the market.  He estimated the average customer would have paid NZ$1500 in such fees over the last six years, with some small businesses paying many times this amount.The New Zealand Bankers Association