PHOTO: The big four Australian owned banks – ANZ, ASB, BNZ, and Westpac – continued to dominate the sector. Photo credit: Getty
The profits of the country’s banks have fallen by more than a quarter over the past year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a fall in margins because of low interest rates and higher costs.
Business advisory firm KPMG’s latest Financial Institutions Performance Survey for 2020 showed bank profits fell 28 percent on the year before to $4.1 billion, the biggest annual fall in a decade.
KPMG head of banking and finance John Kensington said the banks were in strong financial shape going into the crisis and the impact on their finances was to be expected, but they had fared better than feared because of the strength of recovery in activity.
“They went into it in good shape, but also a lot of the risk resides on the government balance sheet at this stage. The government did a lot such as the wage subsidy which was easy to get … and it was of an amount that tided people over, which allowed people to keep jobs and most businesses been able to hold on to their staff.”
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