The Commonwealth Bank’s Open Advice Review (OAR) Program has yet to yield any compensation for customers, because the scale of the program is more complex than previous remediation programs conducted by the bank, according to an independent report.
Promontory Financial Group, the independent expert appointed to monitor, review and report on the OAR, has released its initial report on the program. The report provides an overview of the OAR framework and the processes established to review case files for customers who believe they may have received inappropriate advice from a provider in the CBA’s advice network.
However, the report stated that the OAR had yet to finalise any customer assessments (at the time of publishing), and therefore had not issued any compensation payments. Promontory reports that this is because the ‘…customer-initiated nature of the OAR program, the size and time frame involved, and the need to deal fairly and consistently with arising issues, required a comprehensive, well-designed approach on a different scale to previous programs’.
Since the program was announced in early July, more than 4,700 customers have come forward to request a review of their advice files. Promontory’s report notes that the number of registrations received prompted CBA to:
- Increase the number of call centre staff employed to manage telephone registrations
- Relocate the call centre on two separate occasions to accommodate the growing number of staff and an upgrade to the phone infrastructure to allow for the calls to be recorded
- Implement a new CRM system to cater for the large number of customers registering for the program
- Develop a specialised file retrieval process for customers of Financial Wisdom, to account for the different file systems used by the independently-owned practices
In order to test the adequacy and robustness of processes that will be used to assess customer cases under the program, CBA is conducting a pilot program with 60 cases. The aim of this pilot is to ensure that customers will receive fair, consistent and efficient case assessments, and to provide the independent experts appointed to oversee the program visibility of the processes employed by the OAR team.
Along with a range of selection criteria, customers were prioritised for the pilot if they were previously identified as suffering financial or personal hardship. The pilot program commenced in November 2014 and is expected to conclude in January 2015, following the issuance and consideration of assessment outcomes for all customers in the pilot.
