It is intended to help businesses and households plan with greater confidence in managing their consumption patterns and saving and investment decisions, and to help shape expectations about the future path of inflation and interest rates. This also helps market participants to anticipate the Reserve Bank’s policy responses as new data becomes available.
More recently, the use of PC-banking and the internet to initiate transactions have been growing rapidly in popularity. Cheques are progressively disappearing, but - contrary to longstanding predictions of a "cashless society" - the use of currency has continued to grow. In the wholesale markets, the Kiwi Interbank Transfer System (KITS) began in 1987, to handle electronically some payments between the four big banks.