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It has been revealed that the major bank ceased business with approximately 500 brokers after they “pushed back” on a requirement to undertake an asset finance test.
Appearing before the financial services royal commission on Thursday (22 March), ANZ’s general manager of small business, Guy Mendelson, revealed that ANZ sought to lift standards after it sold its car finance subsidiary, Esanda, in October 2015.
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“We had a continuous improvement program around a series of responsible lending improvements,” Mr Mendelson said, “and one of them was very much around, not only training of the brokers, but also training of our staff...
“It was very clear that we needed to be very focused on enhancing our responsible lending obligations right across the board. And from that moment forward... the business was working very closely with credit, operational and credit risk to ensure that we were enhancing our controls right across things like training, monitoring, etc.”
In late 2016, ANZ also introduced a training regime, which required brokers to undertake a test to become accredited to sell consumer asset finance.
The training regime involved 12 mandatory modules, 37 reading modules and a 30-question test.
To gain accreditation, brokers have to achieve a 100 per cent score.
Mr Mendelson then revealed that in December 2016, the big four bank disaccredited roughly 500 of its 4,000 finance brokers who failed to complete the training regime designed to lift loan writing standards for car finance.
The ANZ representative claimed that the bank received “push back” from brokers, but it conceded the new requirements were an “impost” to the channel.
“[To] be transparent, a lot of those brokers were not brokers that we had done very much business with. It took approximately 55 minutes to [do] the whole test. So, it was [quite] an impost on the brokers — we got quite a bit of pushback,” the GM added.
Earlier this month, the federal court in Melbourne published its findings and reasons for ordering ANZ to pay a penalty of $5 million for breaches of the responsible lending provisions by Esanda.
