Resilience Reflected in Annual Results - Antonia Watson

Antonia Watson

CEO

ANZ Bank New Zealand Ltd

Covid-19 brought unprecedented challenges to our country and consequently for many businesses, including ANZ NZ, and this is reflected in our full-year result.

Despite the difficult year, ANZ’s continued to perform well, demonstrating we can weather challenging economic conditions and play an important role in supporting customers through the crisis

As New Zealand’s largest bank, we’ve been in a unique position to assist thousands of businesses through a period of severely curtailed business activity. This has helped stabilise the economy and put the country in a better position to recover once the worst of the crisis is over.

I’m particularly proud of our team here in New Zealand. They’ve done incredible work looking after our customers and supporting their colleagues during what has been the most unusual of times.

Despite such challenging conditions, we’ve been able to continue to lend and provide certainty to customers with an approach that is fair, transparent and consistent so access to credit isn’t a factor that holds them back.

During Covid-19, we worked closely with the Government and regulators to implement Government-led support initiatives, such as home loan deferrals and the Business Finance Guarantee Scheme, as well as a major programme of reduced fees, charges and interest rates, to help customers through the crisis.

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So far, we’ve provided financial help to around 43,000 personal, home and business loan customers through repayment deferrals or adjustments covering lending of around $27 billion.

To help the most vulnerable in our communities, we donated a total of $2 million to Women’s refuge, Age Concern New Zealand and the Salvation Army’s food bank network, as well as the Red Cross and a series of local charities in the Pacific. A $1m sports grant system was also established to support more than 400 grassroots cricket and netball clubs and initiatives.

The donations were in addition to our $13 million annual contribution of local sponsorships and donations to sports, arts, cultural and community organisations and events.

While the Covid-19 crisis is far from over - and we all need to remain vigilant – New Zealand has made much better progress in fighting the virus than most countries.

While that’s encouraging there will be many challenges as the country emerges from the high level of response and starts to rebuild.

¹ANZ New Zealand represents all of ANZ’s operations in New Zealand (NZ Geography), including ANZ Bank New Zealand Limited, its parent company ANZ Holdings (New Zealand) Limited and the New Zealand branch of ANZ.

²Statutory profit has been adjusted to exclude non-core items to arrive at cash profit continuing basis, the result for the ongoing business activities of ANZ New Zealand. Refer to Summary of key financial information for details of reconciling items between cash profit and statutory profit.