Kelly Kaplon

ANZ offers Banking on Women events that are often at a lovely venue with great food and drinks and the opportunity to mingle and meet interesting women. If anything it is a good and free way to catch up with friends (for those ANZ Banking Women customers and non customers). They do these events well from a social perspective.

They invite speakers along, which are a mixed bunch when it comes to relevance. None have actually been focused on business and the financial empowerment of women, though some have been amazing women in their own right (current ANZ ambassador excluded.)

If the ANZ are hosting these very expensive events purely for a social purpose for their female banking clients, then they achieve this – though personally I think we would all prefer for them to save this money and put it back into keeping their staff or lowering our bank fees!

They have made the mistake of marketing these events as delivering business and personal value to women – which for myself – I am yet to experience any value beyond the social. This may be why they are considering scrapping these events, along with various other initiatives such as the ‘Break Out’ program which has gone.

Let me take you through the most recent event, however I will spare you too many of the painful details. It was so dull and boring that even their ambassador (Antonia Kidman) was falling asleep on the stage as she sat with a panel of ANZ employees, bar one marketing lady.

Antonia, devoid of personality,  recited her uninspiring story of being divorced and that she did not know anything about finance. Clearly that delivered a lot of value to us all!

They then recounted job market information (the same as we hear and read in the news every day) and finally included some interesting statistics from an ANZ Women Survey they conducted into the financial habits of women.
A few interesting points here though not enough to justify sitting through the presentation. I would have preferred to have just read the survey.

Finally question time came – the only exciting part of the presentation. There was a mixtures of ages and women in the audience, who all seemed pretty astute and many angry with the ANZ for how they treat female customers, fail to deliver a personal service, make things complicated which results in its clients often paying more in fees than they should for products and services and so on. All those who asked questions, did so professionally and raised good points. The ANZ panel failed miserably to address these questions raised.

Interestingly, similar to their lack of service, they failed to deliver any value when it comes to helping women become more financially confident. Again supported by the number of women who asked about – how do I find out about being more financially astute, where do I go, who do I talk to, what do I read and so on. No real responses were given that offered any solutions to the audience. One suggested talk to a girlfriend who is good with money. Well that is okay, however you have jus told us from your survey only 1% of women talk about it, so that may make it a bit hard one would think!

They have not recognized that consumers are intelligent, that they read and talk and that they want more. They say that they are listening to their customers – yet customers don’t care that they are listening until they are actually acting. Actions speak louder than words. At the moment ANZ seems to be focused on the words and telling us how much they are listening. I will be interested to see if they act!