How Canstar avoids conflicts of interest

Canstar New Zealand Ltd is committed to offering comprehensive information to consumers for free.

At Canstar New Zealand, one of our guiding principles is to put consumers at the centre of our business, and we live this daily. As a commercial business dedicated to helping consumers confidently find the right product for them, we stand by the following principles to ensure the integrity of our ratings, research and editorial content is fiercely protected.

1 Our research and editorial teams are not influenced by our commercial objectives

In order to best serve consumers, it is important that our sales team operates separately from our research area and team of journalists. We have designed our office layout, reporting lines, and considered access to information carefully to avoid any potential conflicts of interest between these areas. This helps ensure we can maintain the highest standards of integrity and quality in our research and editorial areas.

We have a separate team in Australia (Canstar Pty Limited) that looks after our website.

Most subscriptions and licenses with New Zealand financial institutions are negotiated by our team at Canstar New Zealand Ltd.

2 We are open about our research methodologies

We publish our research methodologies on our website. These show how we calculate the winners of our ratings and awards based on the prices, fees and product features considered in our quest to help consumers find the product that’s right for them. We work with the banking and finance industry through a series of annual workshops where we discuss and refine these methodologies.

3 We are clear on how we get paid

At Canstar we believe we can best serve our customers by being open about how we run our business, and in that spirit, we are clear about how we make money. You can read more about this here.

Information updated as at 8 February 2021.