In what is becoming a familiar scenario, a senior banker has been hauled out to the Royal Commission into banking misconduct to explain the underlying causes of problems discovered in recent years. This time, midway through day 17, the witness was Kieran Forde, head of wealth solutions and partnerships at Australian and New Zealand Banking Group, there to give evidence about improper conduct by five financial advisers.  That improper conduct included forging customer signatures or initials, misappropriating customer funds and misleading or deceiving customers. The culprit, "Mr A" was a director of a company which was an authorised representative of millennium3 Financial Services, then ultimately a subsidiary of ANZ. (ANZ has since sold most of its wealth management business, including millennium3)Counsel-assisting Rowena Orr wasted little time in drawing out an admission that five files of cases run by Mr A were included in an audit where Mr A's advice received a rating of "very poor".Mr A, however, did not face any disciplinary consequences as a result of these audit results, and in June and July 2011 following this audit, Mr A told a number of his clients about an investment opportunity. He told them the initial sale price for the investment property was over A$2 million, but he had negotiated a purchase price of $1.655 million.Then there was a 30 per cent cash deposit required plus stamp duty, leaving $600,000 to be kicked in by individual investors. Five clients did so. This was despite a prohibition on financial advisers giving advice to customers to invest in particular properties.It seems Mr A was buying the property in his own name, rather than transferring it to a unit trust to be shared by all the investors - his clients.The clients heard very little from Mr A about this property for the next 18 months. And in November 2011, millennium3 conducted another audit of Mr A, from which he received a rating of "very poor advice" for four of them and "poor advice" for the fifth.Yet, as Forde conceded, nothing was done by millennium3 or by ANZ, nor was anything done when approached by defrauded customers seeking redress  - the ANZ solution was to give 28 days' notice of millennium3's intention to terminate his authorised representative agreement. Not to investigate, and not to retain copies of records before Mr A left. Orr: "You can't say why ANZ didn't take those steps at that time?"Forde: "No.  The only logical reason is that the commercial interests of millennium3 took precedent. ...Over the interests of the clients?"Finally when the complaints started arriving, ANZ's first instinct was to require its customers to do all the digging.  Even now, six years on, after ANZ sold its OnePath wealth management arm (which included millennium3), the issue is far from resolved, with over 100 SMSF clients lined up, awaiting reimbursement.Orr: "And do you not know how many customers were affected because the advice review team is still reviewing the customer files?""I understand that to be the case, yes.  They're still