ANZ agrees compo deal over OnePath breaches

ANZ's OnePath subsidiary will pay $4.5 million in compensation over breached relating to its life, general insurance, superannuation and funds management activities, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) announced today.

The regulator revealed that "from early 2013 to mid-2015, around 1.3 million customers were affected by breaches, requiring refunds and compensation of around $4.5 million, rectifications and other remediation of approximately $49 million".

"ASIC was concerned that the breaches together reflected compliance issues which may impact on Australian Financial Services (AFS) licence obligations of entities in the ANZ Group. ANZ has engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to independently review the OnePath subsidiaries' compliance management framework," a statement from the regulator said.

"ANZ has agreed to take appropriate actions to implement recommendations stemming from the PwC review. ASIC is also separately monitoring rectification of the breaches as some breaches are yet to be finalised."

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The breaches included:

• failure to provide disclosure documentation for some insurance products;
• inadequate systems or processes to ensure compliance. In some cases processes did not ensure reasonable steps were taken to contact customers or that statutory timeframes were met. Some processes included manual steps that were not followed up on;
• insufficient supervision of some outsourced functions, including third party call centres;
• processing errors, such as payments made to incorrect superannuation accounts; and
• significant time taken to identify some breaches.
• Following ASIC's announcementsystems will be undertaken to further strength, ANZ Wealth Australia managing director, Alexis George, confirmed the bank had engaged PwC in January 2016 to conduct an independent compliance review within its OnePath subsidiaries, relating compliance breaches that were proactively reported to the regulator.
• "While the majority of these compliance breaches are in the past, we know we can do better. We agreed with ASIC last year that an independent review of our en our compliance systems," she said.
• "We would like to apologise to impacted customers and assure them we've been working hard to improve our controls.
• "As soon as we became aware of issues early in 2013 we reported these breaches to ASIC and provided our full cooperation with their review of the matter. We've also taken significant additional steps to strengthen our compliance systems, including targeted external audits and additional staff training to improve monitoring, reporting and governance."
• As part of the review, PWC will identify any gaps in OnePath's compliance systems and make recommendations to improve frameworks, policies and processes.

Following ASIC's announcementsystems will be undertaken to further strength, ANZ Wealth Australia managing director, Alexis George, confirmed the bank had engaged PwC in January 2016 to conduct an independent compliance review within its OnePath subsidiaries, relating compliance breaches that were proactively reported to the regulator. 

"While the majority of these compliance breaches are in the past, we know we can do better.  We agreed with ASIC last year that an independent review of our en our compliance systems," she said. 

"We would like to apologise to impacted customers and assure them we've been working hard to improve our controls. 

"As soon as we became aware of issues early in 2013 we reported these breaches to ASIC and provided our full cooperation with their review of the matter. We've also taken significant additional steps to strengthen our compliance systems, including targeted external audits and additional staff training to improve monitoring, reporting and governance." 

As part of the review, PWC will identify any gaps in OnePath's compliance systems and make recommendations to improve frameworks, policies and processes.