ANZ Bank's costs of operating outbound call centres may have been slashed by as much as 85 per cent in 2012, according to evidence given yesterday in the Federal Court.Paul Regan, the principal of San Francisco-based forensic accountants Hemming Morse, told the hearing into the exception fees class action, which is being held in Melbourne, that the bank had achieved a "significant decrease in collection costs" since moving part of its call centre operations to Manila in 2011.Acting on a request from Maurice Blackburn, Regan conducted a forensic audit of the bank's expenses for managing overdraws and other transactions that trigger exception fees, and concluded that operating costs at the Manila centre averaged about 36 cents for online collections tasks compared with A$2.46 for the same work done previously in Melbourne. "It seems to have been a very good decision by the ANZ to move the call centre from Melbourne to Manila from a cost perspective," he told the court.In other evidence given to the court, Regan contested the bank's formula for calculating the overall costs incurred on account overdraws and late payments, maintaining that these were overstated.Regan appeared alongside ANZ's expert witness, Will Inglis of Deloitte, who included a wider sweep of cost items in his calculation of expenses associated with exception events.Inglis' estimate was higher because he included group-wide costs, such as product development, technology transformation projects, rent on premises and assurance, whereas Regan did not.ANZ counsel Alan Archibald asked Regan to justify his exclusion of these items in his calculation as they were potentially part of the infrastructure of providing services to credit card customers.Regan acknowledged they were part of the infrastructure of the bank but said he had excluded them in his calculations because they were "indirect costs unaffected by exception events".Archibald then asked Regan whether he had included such "indirect infrastructure costs" in an expert opinion he provided to US bank, Wells Fargo, in a recent American case on exception fees.Regan acknowledged that he had included some items such as the cost of premises in the expense calculation on exception fees for Wells Fargo but said he did not call them "indirect infrastructure costs".Archibald: "You excluded indirect infrastructure because of the nature of the questions you were asked to address?'"Regan: "Yes."Michael Lee, counsel for the plaintiffs, later told the court that the judge sitting in the Wells Fargo case had directed the jury to exclude "indirect costs" in their deliberations.The evidence of the two international bank fee experts might be influential in determining the outcome of the trial, which hinges on whether ANZ levied exorbitant fees on customers who overdrew their accounts and were late in making payments to the bank.If some of the cost items cited by Inglis are not found to be legitimate expenses associated with managing exception fee events then the bank's defence against claims of unconscionable behaviour might be dealt a heavy blow.Lee also cast doubt on the inclusion of provisioning and regulatory capital costs in light of recent findings in