From Banking Day:
The outline of terms of reference for any royal commission into banking turned up in the dissenting report of Labor members of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics’ review of the major banks’ performance.
They include:
- how widespread instances of illegal and unethical behaviour are within Australia’s financial services industry;
- how Australia’s financial services institutions treat their duty of care to their customers;
- how the culture, ethical standards and business structures of Australian financial services institutions affect the behaviour of these institutions;
- whether Australia’s regulators are really equipped to identify and prevent illegal and unethical behaviour;
- comparable international experience with similar financial services industry misconduct and best practice responses to those incidents; and
Why have that when you can have Do-nothing Malcolm’s excellent self-regulation, from Domainfax come the main recommendations released by chairman David Coleman:
- A Banking and Financial Sector Tribunal should be established by 1 July 2017 which will replace the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Credit and Investments Ombudsman and the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal. The banks should cover the costs of setting up the tribunal.
- Banks should have to name the senior executives responsible for “significant breaches” of their financial services licences in public reports to ASIC by 1 July 2017. These reports should be made within five days of the incident and should include how and why it occurred and if senior executives suffered any consequences.
- The ACCC should set up a team to make recommendations to the Treasurer on how “to improve competitionin the banking sector”.
- Banks should open up access to their customer’s data so that bank accounts become more “portable” and customers can change banks more easily by July 2018. The Corporations Act should be amended so banks are punished if they do not do this.
- The government should launch a review into how to make it easier for new banks to open up.
- Banks should launch independent reviews into their own ability to respond to misconduct, and the reviews should be completed by July 2017 and recommendations implemented by 31 December 2017.
- Banks that provide financial advice should be required to inform all the clients of dodgy financial advisors.
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It’s hard to believe that there is a global revolution underway against banksters and elites, no?
Meanwhile, they’re all doing such a bang-up job that:
Standard & Poor’s has placed the Australian banks in a basket alongside those of Russia, Hong Kong, Brazil, Japan and China in a global outlook for credit quality that identifies banking environments facing negative pressures.
The ratings agency says that 11 of the 20 largest banking markets face challenging conditions, with more banks in the Asia-Pacific and Latin-American regions added to S&P’s negative outlook over the last six months.
Standard & Poor’s lowered the credit rating outlook on Australia from stable to negative in July. In October it followed through by revising the outlook of 25 Australian banks to negative, including Macquarie and Bank of Queensland.
The report states that the Australian banking sector faces a one in three chance that the economic or industry risk of operating in a banking environment could change in the near term.
…Australia and Hong Kong were two countries in the Asia-Pacific region where escalating property prices had emerged as being “a key risk factor for financial institution ratings in 2017”.
“Additionally, we now consider that the Australian government’s supportiveness toward the systemically important banks in Australia could also come under pressure in the next two years,” the report said.
Anyone would have thought that Do-nothing Malcolm was a bankster himself. Oh wait…
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