Brian Hartzer, Westpac Group CEO in an address to the American Chamber of Commerce, has asserted his bank is not waiting for change to be imposed on it by the Hayne royal commission. In a wide-ranging presentation, Hartzer took the opportunity to announce "some new steps" to be taken in the light of admission that some of the issues took too long to fix. "While it's too soon to know what changes the royal commission will recommend, there are some clear themes that we know are contributing to the trust gap," he said. "The first was around the perception that some of the incentives for our people, or third parties, have been structured in a way that put the interests of the bank and its shareholders before the interests of customers." The Sedgwick review, commissioned by the Australian Banking Association made a number of recommendations on remuneration of customer-facing staff. Hartzer said Westpac would fully implement the recommendations of the Sedgwick review for its employees from October this year, two years earlier than required. "This builds on steps we took two years ago as the first bank to remove sales incentives for tellers, and to de-link increases in base pay from product sales," he said. In another step, from October of this year, customers of BT Financial Advice will benefit from the removal of grandfathered payments attributable to their BT superannuation, investment, insurance and platform products - even though these payments remain permitted under the Future of Financial Advice reforms. This will benefit more than 140,000 BT customers. A second area of focus announced by Hartzer covered customer complaints, which he said was now at a point where "less than 0.3 per cent of customers complain in a year". Hartzer promised Westpac would "become more proactive at spotting customers who might be vulnerable or at-risk, and putting them together with the right decision-makers to address problems before they escalate further," and one step in this direction has been to appoint a new group executive - Carolyn McCann - to oversee all customer complaints and their resolution across the Westpac Group. Another strategy is to employ artificial intelligence to listen to the thousands of customer calls that come into Westpac contact centres each day, to pick up on issues that require immediate action. "We're simplifying our website to make it easier for customers to give feedback or raise concerns. And we're creating a dedicated contact centre team to support our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander customers, taking into consideration some of the identification challenges and cultural differences faced by these customers," Hartzer added. Complexity has also generated its share of complaints, with long, hard-to-understand disclosure documents, legacy products sitting alongside new products with different terms, fees, and conditions; and forcing customers to follow different processes depending on whether they visit a branch, mobile app, or broker. Hartzer said: "We've already reviewed more than 320 products have been reviewed, and over 150 changes made - for example, reducing the number of consumer products on sale by more than 50 per cent, and reducing duplicate statement