By Alex Tarrant
Customers walking into National Bank branches on Fridays may be confused to see staff sporting ANZ tops, while keeping tabs on Rugby World Cup result scoreboards with the ANZ logo on them.
Front-line staff at the National Bank are spending their Fridays getting used to wearing the ANZ logo on their shirts, but the move isn't a merger of the sister banks' brands, but rather a Rugby World Cup initiative, ANZ New Zealand says.
ANZ is a sponsor - "official bank" - of the Rugby World Cup, with the bank getting into the swing of things by letting tellers wear ANZ world cup shirts, while backroom staff are allowed to wear their team's colours, a spokeswoman for ANZ NZ told interest.co.nz.
ANZ NZ has been mulling the ongoing use of the National Bank brand in New Zealand, with the bank telling interest.co.nz in June that a review should be completed by the end of the year on what action it would take to bring the two closer together. See more in Gareth Vaughan's article here. ANZ's New Zealand CEO David Hisco believes operating two separate banks in the country is inefficient, and is hoping to make a decision which is widely expected to see a complete folding of the National Bank brand, and it taking on ANZ's.
But the Friday move was just for the duration of the Rugby World Cup, purely due to the bank's sponsorship of the event, a spokeswoman said.
ANZ announced the A$4.915 billion purchase of the National Bank from Britain's Lloyds TSB in October 2003. The price excluded a dividend paid to Lloyds of NZ$575 million from National Bank's retained earnings. ANZ said then it intended to retain both the ANZ and National Bank brands for retail and small business customers subject to a trademark agreement. The group's rural business would operate under the National Bank name.
Last year ANZ renewed its rights to use the Lloyds black horse on a green and white background as the National Bank logo until the end of 2014.
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