As criticism piles on the banking sector’s eye-watering profits, it looks like all political parties finally agree there needs to be some level of investigation.
The scope and timeframe of an official inquiry - and who should do it - is still being scrapped over but we can all agree the banks made a lot of money.
Collectively, they made NZD$10.3 billion last year - but is that something to celebrate or investigate?
Massey University associate professor of business Claire Matthews told Tova O'Brien it's not a surprising amount of money.
"It is a very large amount of money but the reality is that the banks are very large organisations," Matthews said.
"The focus tends to be on the four largest banks, which make about $6 billion over $10 billion but, between them, they've got $500 billion worth of assets. So when you think about $6 billion on $500 billion worth of assets, it becomes quite a small number."
Matthews added that "banks are helpful" and "supportive", telling O'Brien that as New Zealand moves into a recession, banks will need to have made the profits in advance so that they can cope with the reduction in profits.
"And the potential losses that they will make because their customers are in recession," she said.
"We see that in recent crises around COVID, we've seen it around the cyclone and they offer support to their customers.
"[They] do go out of their way to provide support and not necessarily reduce interest rates, but allow for slower payments or no payments for a while. So there are all sorts of things that they do actually do to support and it does cost them."
However, also O'Brien spoke to founder of 2Degrees and anti-monopoly campaigner Tex Edwards on Friday morning, who has been leading calls for an inquiry.
Edwards believes banks are making too much money and are profiting at the expense of their customers.
"It's not good for the Kiwi consumers. It's hurting baseline New Zealanders and Kiwis," Edwards said.
"Don't just listen to me on the matter… Listen to the third-party banking rating agencies and listen to the other benchmark banks.
"How you judge that these banks are making too much money is the international benchmarks."
Edwards said bank operations are not as simple as people may think, saying there is a definite need for a "proper, detailed inquiry".
"When you have extremely profitable banks like you do in New Zealand it actually creates risks," Edwards said.
"There's been a history of very profitable banks having to be bailed out by the government. They tend to take excessive risks when they're taking too much and making too much profit."
"All these big banks have big treasury operations and it's not just profitability that this review analyses, it's the risk profile of the banks."
Listen to the full 'Two Sides' interview between Claire Matthews and Tex Edwards and Tova above.
You can also download the full interview on the Tova podcast, and listen on the go.
