ASB, the Banking Ombudsman and Cash Advances

I am currently in a fascinating discussion with the Banking Ombudsman about the term Cash Advance.

I have a credit card but I keep it in positive balance. My fifth form economics teacher told us about how he had got into credit card debt and used credit cards to pay off credit cards. I guess it scared me for life so I am very careful with them.
Anyway, ASB have started charging what they call a Cash Advance fee. This use to be when you took money out of an ATM and drove your balance into negative. This never affected me because I had a positive balance. We use our credit cards for getting cash out overseas because it is very convenient.
Recently they seem to have changed this and this year when we went to Siberia we got whacked with these Cash Advance fees.
I have two issues with these fees. Firstly, I am not happy paying NZ$5 on top of the already high fees for overseas transaction to withdraw my money out of an ATM. Secondly, the term Cash Advance is misleading. It certainly applies if I am using the credit provided by a credit card. But if I have a debit balance, it is not an advance. It is a withdrawal.
In the past ASB have been very customer focused. However recently they have started stinging us every which way with fees. When I rang up to query this they were not very responsive.

SO... the time has come. We are voting with our feet and moving to KiwiBank.By mid March we will have moved everything to Kiwibank. So far they are very customer focused. They have some really nice touches like giving us 30 days to get all our accounts and APs etc sorted before charging setup fees. They are paying everything to move us from our other banks. The deal they do on the mortgage is good. Their people seem very nice. I can understand why they are growing and other banks are not. I philosophically disagree with the government owning a bank but I can not argue with the service and the option it gives us.

Back to the Banking Ombudsman. So far the word useless is an apt description of this office. I have Bachelors and Masters degrees. Yet even I could not make head nor tail of one paragraph they wrote to me.

While there is a prima facie case for such a role, it seems that there is little point in our tax payer dollars being wasted on such a position. It would be better to make the same amount of funding available for lawyers to bid for so they could take class actions against organisations when they breach consumer law. Such an approach is litigious but is better than the alternative which seems to be sector capture (when the Ombudsman does the bidding of the sector they are suppose to be policing).

So my recommendations...

1. Avoid ASB like the plague. My prediction is that they will be regarded as being like Westpac in less than 5 years time. A good business bank but does over the individual.
2. If you have issues with your bank, go to Kiwibank.
3. if you are in the National Party and want some quick runs on the board when Labour gets the boot, look first at the Banking Ombudsman. You won't lose anything by giving this black hole of tax payer money the flick.

Finally, this hassle with ASB has reminded me of just how much of a difference good customer care makes. Many years ago I signed up for a Vodafone plan. It was perfect for me. Eventually they phased out that plan. Then they forced me onto a plan that was not as good for me. I wrote to them and they recognised the change was a step back and gave me $200 credit. I was very happy with that. Five years later I am still a very happy Vodafone customer and I have finally been able to give Telecom the flick because Vodafone launched a plan that was perfect for me. I am sure that they have well and truly made back that $200. AON Insurance is another organisation who has seen me right and given very good customer service. I have been a customer with AON (and their predecessors) for over 15 years.