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‘We made mistakes’ with advice, ANZ admits

ANZ Bank has admitted it poorly managed its OnePath financial advisory and life insurance arm, blaming more than a million breaches on a failure to thoroughly test systems.

Chief executive Shayne Elliott admitted to a federal parliamentary committee on Wednesday his bank had made mistakes with OnePath, including directing the superannuation of 1400 people into the wrong account.

“That was a mistake of reasonable magnitude,” he told the House of Representatives economics committee in Canberra.

“What we’ve done is put it right for our customers and we’ve put them back to the situation they would have been in otherwise.”

Mr Elliott insists the processes have been fixed to ensure the breaches can’t happen again, and confirmed individuals involved had copped financial consequences.

“We made a mistake, it was poorly managed,” he said.

“We didn’t test our systems well enough in terms of making these transitions of super funds.”

About $30 million was deposited into the incorrect superannuation funds with other breaches including ANZ failing to follow up on uncashed cheques including life insurance claims and super benefits.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission found more than one million customers were impacted by the breaches.

Banks’ pay day

Meanwhile, new research show the four big banks make millions of dollars out of delaying official interest rate cuts.

The big four banks can collectively make about $8.6 million a day when they don’t fully pass onto borrowers a hypothetical 0.25 percentage point cut in the Reserve Bank’s cash rate.

That’s the finding of an analysis by Abbas Valadkhani, a professor of economics at Swinburne University of Technology, that also shows most building societies and some credit unions can offer more competitive home loans than banks.

“If ANZ, CBA, NAB and Westpac manage to postpone lowering their mortgage interest rates say by 10 days, they can potentially each make an extra $16-26 million dollars in profits,” he wrote on The Conversation website.

ANZ has a 16 per cent share of an open and competitive market in Australia.

While the bank’s profit is large — at about $7 billion — it is less than 1 per cent of the $900 billion in assets that it holds.

-with AAP

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