Home loan high could be “wearing off”

Rate cuts on home loans have seen the big four hold their highest personal customer satisfaction rating in almost two decades, but micro business customers are far less impressed, research shows.  

The personal satisfaction rating for banks held static at 81.6 per cent in February, the same score as January, according to the latest Roy Morgan Consumer Single Source survey.  

Driven by cuts in interest rates on home loans, CBA led the big four’s satisfaction ranking with 82.1 per cent of customers happy, followed by NAB (80.3 per cent), Westpac (78.0 per cent) and ANZ (77.9 per cent). 

Over the 12 months, business customers’ satisfaction has lifted 3.5 per cent compared to 0.8 per cent for other customers, the research shows.  

Micro business customers had much lower satisfaction levels, with just 64.5 per cent content with their bank.  

The poorer ratings from business customers could start to affect the opinions of personal customers, according to Roy Morgan’s industry communications director Norman Morris.  

“With two million of these businesses [having] close links to their personal banking, a low satisfaction score for their business bank is likely to have a negative impact on their personal banking satisfaction rating,” he said.  

Morris said the fact there had been no satisfaction improvement from personal customers in the last two months also signaled the home loan impact could be starting to drop off.   

“The home loan interest rate reductions over the last two years have been driving big improvements in customer satisfaction but with no change in rates since August 2013, it appears that the impact of these reductions is wearing off, with satisfaction among home loan customers of the big four banks declining in January and February this year,” he said.