Hisco said it was "solid" result but that the accounting change last year made the result look better than it was.
"It's a bit flattering in the headline numbers but we tend to look at the underlying numbers that were not distorted by the change in accounting policies in the last half," he said.
"Those costs have gone out of the run rate in the second half," he said.
"Revenue was up and costs were down - that's usually a pretty good recipe for a profit uplift," he said.
Hisco said margins were tighter, reflecting more customers locking in to fixed-rate mortgages and a more competitive market for deposits. It also reflected a slight change in the ANZ's lending book in favour of home lending and less commercial lending.
Net interest income increased 3 per cent compared with the previous year, primarily reflecting continued lending growth.
In Australia, the parent company reported a 23 per cent lift in cash profit to A$3.41 billion for the six months, which was in line with market expectations.
ANZ declared an interim dividend of A80c a share, unchanged from last year's interim payout.
Hisco, who spoke out last year about what he said was an overheated Auckland property market, said the bank had lost about 20 basis points of market share in the mortgage lending market by adopting a more selective approach to its lending.
Lower levels of credit losses reflected improvements in credit quality in the commercial and agri portfolios, partially offset by increased and new provisions.
ANZ's KiwiSaver business now has more than 725,000 investors. Funds under management grew $700m to almost $10b, making ANZ New Zealand's biggest KiwiSaver provider.
The size of the bank's dividend that it will pay to the parent company will not be known until its disclosure document comes out in a few weeks time. For the year to September 2016, it paid $1.35 billion in dividends, from a net profit of $1.53b, to the parent.
Property boom
ANZ's New Zealand chief executive David Hisco last year spoke out about what he said was an overheated property market. Today Hisco feels a little less uncomfortable with the state of the market.
Last July, Hisco, in an opinion piece for the New Zealand Herald, said: "New Zealand is a great country and we've come out of the Global Financial Crisis well compared with many. But logic tells me things cannot continue to run this hot."
Hisco yesterday said events since then have helped to take some of the steam out of the property market.
"Interest rates have probably bottomed and have started to rise, and I think people are thinking a little harder about borrowing," Hisco said.
"We have had the investor loan-to-value ratio requirements put in place by the Reserve Bank, so that has seen investors stand out of the market even more," he said.
"That's meant that property prices have not been fanned as much," he said.
There was evidence of Auckland property prices starting to flatten out and small declines in some regions.
"All that is a good sign the market is easing, which is good," he told the Herald.
However, Hisco said the factors behind the buoyant property market were still to the fore.
"The economy is good and immigration is still strong, so a lot of the macro factors are still there," he said.
"I am happier that a lot more people are aware that property markets don't always go up; and that they they can go down, that interest rates can go up and that debt just doesn't go away," Hisco said.
