Goodbye to bankers' skull in a top hat

Friday, 7 June 2019

It was goodbye to the bizarre skull in a top hat favicon on the New Zealand Bankers Association website.

The little doom-laden icon carrying the whiff of death and high finance, vanished from the industry body's homepage tab on Wednesday following an inquiry from Stuff.

The death's head wasn't a banking in-crowd joke, or some accidental revelation of a secret society of wealthy bankers incorporating the Victorian top hat symbol of wealth and high finance, according to the association.

Instead, it was an oversight by the association's web-designer, which had not coded for the more respectable association logo of three inter-locked squares to appear as it did on the tabs of its other webpages.

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The website is hosted by Wordpress, and an association spokesman said the skull in a top hat was a default favicon that appeared on the tabs of some internet browsers, unless web-designers coded for a different favicon to appear.

This had not happened in the case of the NZBA's homepage.

Several hours after Stuff's inquiry, the skull in the top-hat was gone, and inter-locked squares logo had replaced it.

​Favicons first appeared in 1999 with Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5, and have since become standard so companies' and organisations' webpages stand out from among the tabs people have open, and on their bookmark bar.

The Bankers Association is a lobby group for its member banks, including ASB, BNZ, Westpac, Kiwibank and ANZ.

It is battling the Reserve Bank, which proposes to require banks to hold more capital to strengthen them, and reduce the chance of them failing causing a national economic crisis.