Six of Australia’s largest banking and financial services institutions have paid or offered a total of $3.6 billion in compensation, as at 30 June 2022, to customers who suffered loss or detriment because of fees for no service misconduct or non-compliant advice.
This includes $438m paid or offered by the institutions between 1 January to 30 June 2022 (refer 22-020MR).
AMP, ANZ, CBA, Macquarie, NAB and Westpac (the institutions) undertook the review and remediation programs to compensate affected customers [i] as a result of two major ASIC reviews (refer Background). ASIC commenced the reviews to look into:
- the extent of failure by the institutions to deliver ongoing advice services to financial advice customers who were paying fees to receive those services. See Report 499 Financial advice: Fees for no service (REP 499), and
- how effectively the institutions supervised their financial advisers to identify and deal with ‘non-compliant advice’ – i.e. personal advice provided to a retail client by an adviser who did not comply with the relevant conduct obligations in the Corporations Act, such as the obligations to give appropriate advice or to act in the best interests of the clients, at the time the advice was given. See Report 515 Financial advice: Review of how large institutions oversee their advisers (REP 515).
