Eva888:

 

Call me suspicious but received an *email from BNZ this morning. ...

 

You're suspicious.

OP appears to be concerned about Open Bank Resolution. I think there would be more significant economic turmoil before that took place though (e.g. unemployment going from 5% to 20% in a year would be a sign). 

Let's get back to the topic of the notification from the BNZ regarding a system outage. There is nothing at all to suggest it's anything more (and it is nothing more). Planned system outages/updates, and migrations happen all the time. 

From memory when BNZ started the roll out the current Internet Banking/etc systems in 2013 I want to say (might've been 2012), they made it extremely modular.  They're taking the Term Deposit module (and the other supporting systems since they've said call centre/branch staff won't be able to do anything with TDs) offline to seemingly update it.

These things happen regularly. I actually had a look through BNZ's status page history, an instance where they did similar with Credit Cards. I've seen similar with other banks in the past too (but never with this sort of direct advance notice).

BNZ should be commended for being upfront and saying "Hey, if you want to manage these accounts, don't do it on the weekend because it'll be impossible", it's actually refreshing.

Hoping for a family member's sake, they're actually adding some options to manage/convert/open Term PIEs via Internet Banking, because they had a slightly frustrating experience with that recently... and I heard all about it...

@Eva888 Talk about an over reaction clearly a systems upgrade / change

While trying to find out some information semi related to TDs from the BNZ site, I managed to stumble upon https://www.bnz.co.nz/about-us/governance/public-notices/customer-communications-support/term-pie-and-term-deposit-accounts which covers what is happening during the maintenance this weekend.

TL;DR is basically, they're making changes so Term Deposits pay interest on semi-predictable days when they were opened on the 29th, 30th or 31st of the month.

They've also updated the regular Terms and Conditions to make things clearer which are listed at https://www.bnz.co.nz/about-us/governance/public-notices in particular one of the changes is they've made explicit their policy around what happens when people die (they already had some of that as an informal policy because going through that now, but now they're bound to that).

So obviously the Internet Banking changes are explicitly linked to making sure that the systems match the new policies going into effect on Monday, and certainly not something untoward.