Three Pillars Finance
The three pillars of Basel III are minimum capital requirements, supervisory review and market discipline. Between them they help decide what your lender can afford to lend and how it prices the risk - and there is nothing whatsoever you can do about any of it. Financing a vehicle, on the other hand, we can help with.
- Same-day approvals available
- FMA-licensed adviser (FSP1008126)
- 100% New Zealand owned
About the pillars
Basel III is the international framework that governs how much capital a bank has to hold against its lending. It is built on three pillars, it is famously dry, and it quietly shapes the rate you are quoted without ever appearing on your contract.
We are an asset finance broker in New Zealand rather than a banking regulator. We arrange loans for cars, utes, trucks, boats and machinery, and the short version of the pillars is below in case you came here for it.
What the three pillars actually are
Pillar one sets the minimum capital a bank must hold against its lending, weighted by how risky that lending is. Pillar two is the supervisory review, where a regulator can decide the minimum is not enough for a particular bank. Pillar three is market discipline, which in practice means disclosure - banks publish enough about their risk position that the market can form its own view.
Here is the part that is either interesting or infuriating depending on your temperament. This genuinely does affect your loan. It is part of why a lender prices a secured car loan differently to an unsecured personal loan, and part of why some lenders will write business lending that others will not. It shapes the panel we can take your application to.
And there is absolutely nothing you can do with that information. You cannot negotiate with a capital adequacy ratio. It is the rare piece of finance knowledge that is both directly relevant to you and completely unactionable, which is a fairly good description of banking regulation generally.
Other things carry the same name, for what it is worth. The European Union had three pillars from Maastricht until the Lisbon Treaty abolished them in 2009, and pension policy has a set of its own. We cannot help with those either.
There is a third usage, and it appears in no treaty. Three pillars is occasionally taken to mean high interest rates, questionable insurances and poor customer service. There are operators in this market who look to have been built on precisely those.
We are not going to name them. Partly that is good manners, and partly it is because telling you how to spot one is worth considerably more to you than telling you who to avoid. Two questions do most of that work: what margin has been added to the lender's rate before it was quoted to you, and what any add-on insurance actually covers and costs over the term. The first is set out properly on our page about max spread deals, and we are happy to walk you through the second.
How it works
Apply for your loan
Complete the online form or give us a call and we will get your application underway.
We will reach out
We will call to understand what you are trying to achieve and gather anything else that helps get you approved.
Ready to go
Once approved we send your documents to sign, and payout follows shortly after.
Get started today
Tell us what you are looking to finance and we will come back with real options - usually the same day.