By Gareth Vaughan
After dominating Roy Morgan Research's Financial Institution of the Month awards during 2011 and 2012, SBS Bank has dropped off the radar screen this year, which a senior SBS executive blames on his bank's small size.
In Roy Morgan's customer satisfaction awards SBS won the Financial Institution of the Month gong for eight months during each of the last two years, as well as being named Financial Institution of the Year for both 2011 and 2012.
However, SBS has missed out in all four months (January to April) of 2013 for which the award has been dished out so far, with TSB Bank having now won seven months straight, and hasn't even featured in the top five.
Tim Loan, SBS' general manager for finance, told interest.co.nz the problem was SBS' small size.
"You have to have a certain number of results in the survey in order to register," Loan said. "Because we are a small player we are not actually registering in the results at the moment. That's the difficulty for us and the only answer to that one really is to increase our customer base."
A requirement for the financial institution award is that Roy Morgan receives at least 100 responses from customers of any institution over a six month period. A Roy Morgan spokesperson confirmed the SBS numbers were below the sample threshold during the first four months of 2013.
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