Banking versus Banana Smoothies

Recently Westpac, one of the only 4 large banks in Australia, raised its variable mortage rate 0.45 percentage points, double the level of the Reserve Bank’s 0.25 percentage points and significantly more than their competition.  To quell the uprising press and consumer complaints, they sent an email to customers explaining the rate hike which included an interesting video.

Included in the email was an infographically animated video titled “Cool Bananas”, justifying the bank's decision to raise interest rates by comparing the business of banking with selling banana smoothies. Just as a storm hits and destroys a banana field, and increases the prices of banana smoothies, the banks were hit by a crisis of their own, increasing their cost of lending. For those outside Australia, the chosen theme subtly points to an Australian phenomenon in its recent past, namely the banana shortage caused by Cyclone Harry in 2006, which increased banana prices across the country by 400-500%.

Infosthetics has the video on their site.

via Banking versus Banana Smoothies: An Infographic Movie Controversy – information aesthetics.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Graphics financial, infographic