Wealth shortcuts shame NAB anew
Six hundred days later than an aggravated Coleman committee would prefer, National Australia Bank on Friday confessed its latest compliance cock-up in its wealth division. ASIC said NAB misled "at least" 150,000 MLC and other wealth customers, pushing the bank's own product.These customers of NAB or five of its subsidiaries "received deficient disclosure" in relation to either a Statements of Advice or a Financial Services Guide, the bank - prodded by ASIC - divulged on Friday.These guides and statements were provided by the bank in relation to MLC-branded products and boutique investment manager products, ASIC said in a parallel media release.One category of defective practices lasted "between 2007 and early 2016" the bank said.The bank explained that the guides and advice templates "that NAB Group licensed financial advisers provided to customers were not updated to include details of new investment managers that the NAB Group had acquired or taken a shareholding in."The bank said "this meant that customers did not receive information disclosing the relationship between the NAB financial advice licensee and certain NAB Group product issuers that their adviser may have recommended they invest in.Corner cutting "between late 2012 and early 2016" meant that the "Statement of Advice templates that advisers received from NAB instructed customers to refer to their Financial Services Guide for full disclosures of relationships," NAB added."This was intended to make the Statements of Advice easier for customers to read, but they should have included full disclosures."NAB said it identified these errors during a review in late 2015 and then notified ASIC. Both bank and corporate regulator followed the usual practice of clarifying and preparing follow up measures before going on the record last week.In the context of the steadily expanding catalogue of malfeasance in bank wealth management arms, this NAB admission may be no big deal - though the bank misled customers to its own advantage.The coordinated and delayed messaging of the bank with ASIC on the matter looks a prime example of the genre of public advisories on compliance breaches that the Standing Committee on Economics of the House of Representatives wants binned.Among one of the more agitated recommendations of the committee's second report into quizzing sector CEOs, in April was that, "by 1 July 2017, 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."With shaming on its mind the committee called for identifying "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."Insert here, among others in this case, the name of Andrew Hagger, NAB's chief customer officer for consumer and wealth.Andrew Thorburn, NAB's CEO, told a committee hearing in March as Coleman raised a litany of compliance matters that "Hagger has actually led this business