BNZ’s brand mission to help all New Zealanders be good with money so they can do great things with it.

We have been delivering on that purpose for over five years and whilst our brand metrics have remained healthy we needed more non-customers to consider BNZ as the bank for them.

In line with this purpose, we needed to demonstrate to young New Zealanders that we not only understand them and the way they live their lives, but that we genuinely want to help them be good with money by providing them with tools that are truly useful.

One such area of their lives is travel. When it comes to travel, as kiwis we love it – but keeping track of your spending can be stressful. So we wanted to give New Zealanders something truly useful that would help them worry less and enjoy travelling more.

To help New Zealanders be good with money while they travel, we developed and built Convert It. The first currency conversion app that uses Optical Character Recognition to detect and convert prices in over 170 currencies and convert them to New Zealand dollars. After all, it’s easier to track what you’re spending when you can see prices in your own ‘money language.’

New Zealanders’ love of travel and spirit for adventure is legendary. In 2017 alone, Kiwis took almost 3 million

international holidays. That’s the equivalent of 76,000 planes loaded with excited travellers leaving the country, hungry for new and life-enriching experiences.

Finding out 47% of people between the ages of 18 - 34 would rather spend their money on traveling than buying a house, we knew that for budget conscious millennials helping them make the most of travelling was a key opportunity.

Invariably, those experiences cost money and when different currencies come into play things can get tricky.

So in a nation where people believe travel enriches your life, but money takes away their freedom to travel, we found an opportunity to amplify our brand success through doing, rather than just saying.

Convert It uses ground breaking Optical Character Recognition to detect and convert prices in over 170 currencies and convert them to New Zealand dollars. By simply hovering your phone over a price it will automatically display the amount in New Zealand dollars.

Convert It is geotargeted so you get the right currency first time and automatically translates into your home currency. It can also read handwriting rather than just typed prices for those off the track experiences.

No more guessing or estimating, this app helps you quickly and easily know exactly how much you’re spending so you can still splash out on that treasured souvenir, knowing exactly what it cost and confident that you are keeping your spending on track.

An above the line campaign created awareness about Convert It and drove people to download it from the app store.

During its first week, BNZ Convert It was rated #1 Travel app in both app stores. It has been used to convert over 300,000 prices in 174 countries so far. Overall non-customer consideration has risen 2 points up from 33% at the time of launch to 35%. And BNZ Convert is in the process of being licensed by a Canadian financial institution.