ASIC and APRA admit there is cultural change in banking. Nocookies. You have cookies turned off To use this website, cookies must be enabled in your browser. To enable cookies, follow the instructions for your browser below. Facebook App: Open links in External Browser There is a specific issue with the Facebook in-app browser intermittently making requests to websites without cookies that had previously been set. This appears to be a defect in the browser which should be addressed soon. After 12 hours of bank boss grilling, nothing politically has changed. From a political perspective, the most significant element of the 12 hours of grilling of bank bosses over the past three days came right at the death when Westpac's Brian Hartzer, the fourth and final CEO to appear, was wrapping up his testimony.
Hartzer, under sufferance, pretty much admitted that had the banks not agreed to submit themselves to appearing before the House Economics Committee at least once a year, it would have been difficult for the government to keep at bay Labor's populist and popular demands for a royal commission. "I don't remember the who said what exactly," said Hartzer of a meeting earlier this year with Treasurer Scott Morrison. Review of the four major banks: ANZ's Shayne Ellliott. Live article connection interrupted.
Please refresh your browser Bank inquiry day two in 15 dot points... Primrose Riordan Two down, one to go! While CBA's Ian Narev appeared to keep his cool and steamroll over some committee members, ANZ's Shayne Elliott was more apologetic and conceded credit card rates may be too high. Here's what went down today: Good news for punters as ANZ declared it has an appetite to reduce interest rates for credit cards. That's it. ANZ has finished giving evidence for today. Elliott said he would not have any objection to changes to barriers for entry into the banking market in terms of initial capital requirements for smaller players to increase competition, under questioning from Committee Chair David Coleman. Elliott was also asked about ANZ's insurance and superannuation arm OnePath which was the subject of an independence compliance review that affected around 1.3 million customers.
He said he was not aware of anyone being sacked over the matter. Joanna Mather. Increased regulation of banks to follow banking review. After two days of hearings at the parliamentary banking review, it is already apparent that the banking industry is in for a period of increased regulation.
Regulatory expansion has been a feature of the industry since the global financial crisis. Unfortunately that has not worked in favour of increased competition. In the global quest for a safer financial system the big have tended to get bigger and the smaller and mid-tier financial institutions have suffered. In Australia, regional banks have struggled to compete with the big four banks despite being given a leg-up by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, which imposed a higher capital charge on mortgages written by the big four banks. A royal commission into banks would be overkill.
By David Gallagher What will we learn this week that we didn't already know from the Big Four bank CEOs being questioned by Parliament's Economics Committee?
In my view, very little. Liberal MPs show up their Labor counterparts at bank inquiry. Picking the winners and losers from the first day's hearing of the parliamentary inquiry into the big four banks has turned out to be easier than Chanticleer originally anticipated.
Given the amount of time devoted to talking about banks over the past year one would have expected the politicians from both sides of parliament to have come out on top when grilling Ian Narev and David Cohen from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. But it is fair to say that the Labor MPs missed a golden opportunity to make the inquiry a platform for them to put the case for a royal commission into the big four banks. They failed miserably on that front. Two of the Liberal MPs, chairman David Coleman and committee member Julia Banks, emerged from the first day's hearing with their credibility enhanced. Coleman showed a strong commitment to boosting competition. Banks not alone in complex pay packets, but CEO pay is a soft target for review. The declaration by ANZ chief Shayne Elliott that the bank's executive remuneration structure was under review was a welcome admission by at least one of the major banks that the present scorecard was overly complicated.
Elliott told the parliamentary inquiry into the major banks that ANZ was reviewing what metrics were used to measure customer satisfaction and how senior executives were rewarded. He also admitted there were too many metrics involved in the process. This is an issue many investors and proxy advisers have been complaining about for years. How Julia Banks made Shayne Elliott squirm over ANZ's 'blokey culture' Did you hear the one about the young corporate lawyer who applied for an ANZ home loan only to be told only her husband's income – not her's – could be counted because she was a married woman of child-bearing age?
Twenty years later after a career at the top of the corporate world, she became a federal politician, interrogated that bank's current chief executive and ripped him a new one over his institution's "endemic blokey culture". In the words of the working woman's philosopher Dolly Parton in her seminal "9 to 5", "they never give you credit, it's enough to drive you crazy if you let it". It was day two of parliament's mock trial of the big four banks and this time Liberal MP Julia Banks – the corporate insider who was once chief general counsel and company secretary of George Weston Foods, GlaxoSmithKline Australasia and Kraft Foods – had ANZ's Shayne Elliott in her sights. "Do you work with ASIC [Australian Securities Investment Commission] when it suits you? " Banks asked Elliott.