{"id":29451,"date":"2015-04-21T17:53:27","date_gmt":"2015-04-21T07:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/?p=29451"},"modified":"2025-04-17T09:26:25","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T22:26:25","slug":"senate-committee-grills-banks-on-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/2015\/04\/21\/senate-committee-grills-banks-on-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate Committee Grills Banks on Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"line-height: 1.5em;\">The need for an industry standard approach to breach reporting and greater transparency of the employment history of advisers were among the key issues discussed at a Senate Committee hearing featuring senior executives from a number of Australia\u2019s largest financial institutions.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Executives from CBA, NAB, ANZ and Macquarie appeared before the Senate Economics References Committee in Canberra this week, as part of the Scrutiny of Financial Advice inquiry. The focus of the inquiry is the implications of the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms, and how financial services providers and companies have responded to misconduct in the industry.<\/p>\n<p>Each of the institutions presenting before the Committee provided a short statement before taking questions, and in all cases the institutions outlined the steps they had taken to improve financial advice, such as training and education standards, breach reporting and systems and procedures.<\/p>\n<p>Among the other issues raised by the Senators were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What action the institutions took when an adviser acted fraudulently or breached their compliance obligations<\/li>\n<li>What needs to be done to improve transparency within the industry when an adviser who has been fired for poor conduct\/advice goes to another licensee, with a particular focus on the role of ASIC\u2019s Financial Adviser Register<\/li>\n<li>Whether there should be a public compensation fund to support victims of advice failures<\/li>\n<li>What constitutes a \u2018significant breach\u2019 and triggers a report to ASIC, with the Committee noting that there appears to be no standard definition and that each institution has their own approach<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There was a general consensus among participants that the standards of breach reporting and the internal investigation of advice complaints had improved in recent months. However, most agreed that there needed to be an industry standard definition for what constitutes a \u2018significant breach\u2019 and that the ASIC Financial Adviser Register could play an important role in helping to track \u2018bad apples\u2019, including advisers who chose to leave their licensee during an investigation into their conduct.<\/p>\n<p>Coinciding with the hearing, Assistant Treasurer, <strong>Josh Frydenberg<\/strong>, issued a statement highlighting the steps the Government and ASIC has undertaken to raise the standards of financial advice. He confirmed the Government would be consulting with industry and consumer representatives in late April on the recommendations made by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on proposals to lift the professional, ethical and education standards in the financial services industry.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe need to make sure that consumers receive high quality outcomes. And we need to maintain public confidence in the financial services industry. It\u2019s time to put in place an enduring framework that raises the professional, ethical and educational standards of advisers,\u201d Mr Frydenberg said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The need for an industry standard approach to breach reporting and greater transparency of the employment history of advisers were among the key issues discussed at a Senate Committee hearing featuring senior executives from a number of Australia\u2019s largest financial institutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,8],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-29451","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-company-news","7":"category-compliance-regulation","8":"headers-new"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29451"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29451\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}