NZ Post says its balance sheet will have to wear the $100 million in capital Kiwibank needs to meet its regulatory requirements and replace an ageing banking system..
..That meant the state-owned enterprise would have to provide the additional Kiwibank capital, with the lender not yet profitable enough to fund its own capital requirements.
"We have relooked at where we are going and we believe we can certainly manage over the next couple of years without any further capital injection, but that assumes Post is in a position to put another $100m into Kiwibank over that two-year period," Cullen said
Kiwibank is owned by NZ Post which is itself state owned. So taxpayers are on the hook if Kiwibank needs a bailout. But nowadays this seems to be the case whether the bank is privately or publicly owned. Given NZs precarious housing bubble, the NZ Govt will likely be forced to resuce NZ banks over coming years - both public & private.
