Amanda Morrall gets up to speed on some new banking apps from Westpac that are garnering international attention by encouraging customers to save

By Amanda Morrall

The most common question bank customers have?

"What's my bank balance?"

Every year, Westpac alone fields 100 million requests from New Zealanders on this question specifically.

The traditional way of finding this information out has been by either going to the ATM, phoning a call centre or logging onto your account on-line.

As you might expect, a more modern way involves an app.

Since Westpac New Zealand introduced its Cashtank,  60,000 of its customers have downloaded the app checking their bank balance an average of four times a week. As the name suggest, the app is a simple savings barometer that looks much like a petrol gauge. The more you spend, the closer you'll veer into the red zone as the needle heads West.

Callum Wilson,  Westpac's general manager of strategy, productivity and innovation, says this high speed access to bank balances is helping to cultivate a savings mindset because it undermines the spend and forget behaviour that defines modern living.

Westpac estimates that one-third of its customers have gone mobile but the uptake is expected to grow exponentially in the next few years as smartphones become more affordable and widespread.

Like its competitors, Westpac has begun accelerating in this direction.

This past week, it launched Home Club, a complement to its real estate app. Although it hasn't made the leap onto mobile yet, this on-line tool was introduced to help prospective home buyers get a better gauge on house prices, underlying values, movements in the market and affordability. See Gareth Vaughan's article here.

Wilson says it's just a matter of time before Home Club is rendered into a mobile friendly format.

When it does, it will become the sixth in a suite of mobile tools launched by the bank.

While CashTank has attracted attention as far away as New York, it's Impulse Saver app is also generating a buzz. It allows users to make arbitrary savings deposits of any prescribed amount when the mood should strike them.

According to Westpac New Zealanders spend an average of NZ$16.1 million a day in impulse purchases.

Wilson said the idea of the app is to reverse the trend, by making savings as easy as the click of single button.