Buy BNZ bank and merge it with KiwiBank to create a major NZ-owned competitor in the banking sector

NZ First leader Winston Peters said in a speech on May 17 that his party will buy BNZ from its Australian owner NAB, then merge it with KiwiBank.

He said this was needed to create more competition because the big four Australian-owned banks currently dominate 85% of the system.

Peters said the merged entity will be called  National Bank of New Zealand, “a fully Crown owned, commercially run, systemically significant domestic bank with the scale to genuinely compete with ANZ, ASB and Westpac… This is a buy-back to put a New Zealand owned competitor on the field at the scale required to change the behaviour of the foreign-owned banks.”