SYDNEY – Australia’s corporate watchdog rebuked the country’s biggest banks and financial services firms on Monday for delays fixing internal systems that resulted in customers paying fees for services they had not received.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said it had been supervising the four biggest banks – Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd and National Australia Bank Ltd – plus investment bank Macquarie Group Ltd and wealth manager AMP Ltd, as they reviewed the systems which led to wrongful fee charging.
But the regulator said those companies had taken too long to identify systemic failures.
“These reviews have been unreasonably delayed,” said ASIC commissioner Danielle Press.
The reviews were large, involving up to 10 years of operations, six institutions and more than 7,000 advisers, but “the institutions have failed to sufficiently prioritise and resource their reviews, particularly as ASIC advised them to commence the reviews in mid-2015 or early 2016”, Press added. (Reuters)
