Briefs: Westpac opens up on IO and compliance strife 09 May 2019 3:30PM Banking Day staff Briefs, Arrears/performance/credit quality., ASIC, Finance regulation, Major Banks, Mortgages, Westpac Around a third of interest-only mortgage customers at Westpac are as little as one month ahead with their loan repayments, Robert Love, head of credit optimisation for the bank told a Federal Court hearing in Sydney yesterday, The Australian reports. ASIC and Westpac have returned to court to try and resolve a responsible lending settlement that was thrown out of court last year. ASIC has amended its claim, and this week told the court the bank improperly relied on the HEM income measure more than 260,000 times. "The amount of non-compliance, there was a real recognition, certainly at my bank, that there had to be a much, much greater focus on non-financial risk, on conduct risk as a subset of that, and on compliance," Westpac chair Lindsay Maxsted told the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors conference in Melbourne yesterday. Cash earnings at Westpac fell 22 per cent to A$3.3 billion, the bank reported on Friday. The fall was almost entirely due to customer remediation and restructuring costs of $753 million.