RBNZ sees little pressure on big banks' funding with retail deposits covering much of their lending

By Gareth Vaughan

Funding conditions remain "comfortable" for New Zealand's big banks, the Reserve Bank says.

The central bank and prudential regulator made this comment in yesterday's Monetary Policy Statement.

It comes after recent increases to fixed-term mortgage rates from all the major banks, who blamed increasing wholesale funding costs for the increases. Westpac, for example, said late last month wholesale funding costs over the past couple of months had risen by up to 80 basis points at the five year end of the swap curve.

This is an abridged version of this article. The full version was published in our email for paid subscribers. See here for more details and to subscribe.