The High Court has imposed a final penalty of $2.1 million on ASB Bank for fair‑dealing breaches relating to its insurance products and banking services, says the Financial Markets Authority.
The FMA says in a statement that “…ASB admitted making false and/or misleading representations that resulted in financial harm to customers failure to correctly apply multi‑policy discounts on ASB‑branded insurance products, and failure to apply fee exemptions for eligible FastNet Business customers.”
It says this resulted in more than 25,000 customers being refunded approximately $4.7 million by ASB.
The authority notes that in her judgment, Justice O’Gorman said: “Where contraventions of the FMCA are the result of process or system failures, the penalty must be set at a level that creates a strong incentive for financial institutions to maintain adequate systems and processes. The penalty needs to be at a level that clearly signals manual processes without adequate quality assurance and proactive problem detection and escalation is unacceptable.”
FMA Head of Enforcement, Margot Gatland said the penalty “…reflects the seriousness of ASB’s systems failures. Customers are entitled to rely on their bank to apply discounts and fee exemptions accurately. ASB failed to detect and address these issues over many years.”
She acknowledged ASB’s cooperation “…however, the duration of the failings and the delays in identifying and escalating the issues meant that a strong regulatory response was necessary.”
The FMA acknowledges that ASB self-reported the issues and carried out remediation.