The Great Southern agriculture investment debacle has come back to haunt Bendigo and Adelaide Bank which has been forced to implement a remediation process.
The banking group announced today that it had put the process in place as a result of action on the part of the Banking Code Compliance Committee (BCCC).
It said the remediation related to some customers within the Great Southern loan portfolio with the historical breaches relating to debt collection processes, with 81% of the issues identified relating to the 2015 and 2016 calendar years.
The bank has provisioned for $1 million in remediation.
Commenting on the move, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank managing director, Marnie Baker said: “We regret our actions and sincerely apologise for any negative impacts these breaches have caused for our customers”.
“We fell short of our own expectations and that of our customers and the community. These actions do not reflect who we are and what we stand for. We always strive to put our customers and communities first and these historic issues are not acceptable.”
“The bank has addressed the operational issues to prevent this from happening again and has established a remediation program to provide payments to customers where we made mistakes that had an adverse customer impact.”
She said action taken by the bank to address the operational issues in the Great Southern portfolio included:
- The integration of the Great Southern team into the team responsible for financial difficulty assistance to ensure increased oversight and staffing capacity, and consistent application of all financial difficulty processes.
- Strengthened call recording systems, complaints management, training and processes.
- Strengthened oversight processes to regularly review all Great Southern collections and financial difficulty activities.
“We accept and have reflected deeply on the findings and we understand how the mistakes occurred. When we recommenced collections activity following the Supreme Court finding in our favour in December 2014, we experienced a large influx of complex enquiry from Great Southern borrowers. As cited in the BCCC’s notice of sanction, our Great Southern collections team was established and operated separately from the bank’s broader operations, was inadequately resourced, and our processes and systems were insufficient for these staff and the Great Southern customers. Because of this, we made mistakes in how we communicated with and responded to some of these customers.”
