Tribunal momentum overruns EDR schemes
A tribunal that displaces three established dispute resolution schemes is the principal, though unsurprising, recommendation in the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics' review of the major banks' performance.The report from the committee, released yesterday, sticks to the themes explored in public hearings with big banks' chief executives last month, mostly centred on stirring up competition or patrolling the admitted tendency to dodgy conduct.The lead proposal for a tribunal is the policy championed by the Australian government in the build up to the hearings and a mechanism more or less endorsed by major banks over the last two months - and by the Australian Bankers Association yesterday.A Banking and Financial Sector Tribunal should replace the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Credit and Investments Ombudsman and the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal, the committee proposed. Funding would be from the government, with the industry levied to cover costs.The report ventilates angst over the scant sanctions on banks' managers for conduct strife.Thus the committee, which was chaired by Liberal MP David Coleman, recommends that ASIC require Australian Financial Services License holders to publicly report on any significant breaches of their licence obligations within five business days of reporting the incident to ASIC, or within five business days of ASIC or another regulatory body identifying the breach.The MPs called for publication of "the names of the senior executives responsible for the team/s where the breach occurred" and "the consequences for those senior executives and, if the relevant senior executives were not terminated, why termination was not pursued." One further proposal will stretch the status quo, if picked up by government.The committee recommended that, by the end of 2017, the Government review the 15 per cent threshold for substantial shareholders in Authorised Deposit-taking Institutions "to determine if it poses an undue barrier to entry."The Council of Financial Regulators and APRA also received a prod to review processes in assessing and granting banking licences.The committee recommended that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, or the proposed Australian Council for Competition Policy, establish a team to make recommendations to the Treasurer every six months on how to improve competition in the banking sector. Banks may be "forced to provide open access to customer and small business data by July 2018," a prod to the banking sector to accelerate existing, if hesitant, steps toward data sharing.Then, stepping into APRA territory, the economics committee called for major banks "to engage an independent third party to undertake a full review of their risk management frameworks and make recommendations aimed at improving how the banks identify and respond to misconduct."These reviews should be completed by July 2017 and reported to ASIC, with the major banks to have implemented their recommendations by December 2017, the MPs suggested.