00:01It's really hard for customers to detect this issue because their mortgage repayments will
00:07stay at the same amount but that will hide that they're actually paying more interest
00:13than they should be.
00:15Now ASIC said one of the issues is that a lot of these failures went completely undetected
00:21by banks until the financial regulator actually pointed it out to them.
00:26One case, the one woman that the ABC has spoken to, a Brisbane woman, she opened an offset
00:34account with one of the big four banks after they advised that that would be a way for her
00:38to pay less interest on her home loan and it wasn't until she refinanced with another bank
00:44that she discovered that that offset account and her mortgage weren't actually linked and
00:49she'd been paying a lot more interest than she'd actually realised which would be really
00:55shocking.
00:56You can understand that feeling and ASIC says that one of the main issues that's been leading
01:03to this is that a lot of the systems within Australia's banks are manually worked and a
01:10lot of these errors are actually done by staff, 86% of which are actually done by staff ASIC
01:17ASIC said.
01:18So ASIC has really advised that the banks need to be more transparent with customers as well
01:27as update their systems to make sure this doesn't happen because ASIC said in this report
01:32as well when banks did find out that this had been happening a lot of times they didn't
01:37even let customers know or offer compensation.
01:40So here's what one consumer advocacy group had to say about what customers should do in
01:46Australia if they're concerned that this may have happened to them.
01:49These financial products are tricky.
01:52They're not exactly transparent and it can be hard to know if you are receiving the full
01:57benefit or the full discount.
01:58You can call your bank.
02:00You can, in some products, look online in your banking app to try and work it out but absolutely
02:07call your bank.
02:07If you're not happy with the response you can go to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority.
02:12The Australian Banking Association CEO Simon Birmingham has come out today and said to the ABC
02:18that Australians should take confidence that the vast majority of mortgage offset accounts
02:24are working as intended and that banks are resolving the issues.
02:29The Australian Banking Association Council of Sciences
02:29So let's get into it.
02:30We're in T G-s.
Comments