Westpac chief executive Peter King has come through another series of half-yearly questions from the House of Representatives Economics Committee without incident.
The opening minutes of his appearance were given over to questions of shareholder engagement and influence, notably the largest institutional shareholders, with Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street heading the list.
These large passive funds that track the market attracted the attention of several committee members, apparently concerned over the influence that holding 5 per cent of Westpac shares might deliver. Deputy chair Andrew Leigh asked King: "How many Westpac shares do I need to hold to get an hour of your time?”
King denied that there had ever been any "prodding" from shareholders that would take him into anti-competitive territory, or that any investors had ever influenced the direction taken by Westpac.
On shareholder engagement he said: "From my perspective it doesn't feel like it's changed very much in the last couple of years."
"Often the conversation would be on capital levels, or how much provisioning we would need to hold, or why we have different focuses on a strategy."
"There's always feedback on different aspects," King said. "It might be specific matters relating to the company might be climate change. They don't follow any particular pattern. It would depend on the individual shareholder."
In King's opening remarks to the committee, he said he had previously described Westpac's economic outlook as "robust".
"Today the word I would use is resilient," King said.
He said Westpac has A$2.75 billion of mortgages with deferrals on its books, down from a peak of $55 billion total deferrals. Self-employed customers have higher deferral rates. Mortgages for self-employed make up about 15 per cent of the bank's mortgage book but around 30 per cent of deferred loans, King told the committee.
Westpac has $70 million SME in deferred loans, compared to a peak of $10 billion last year.
Labor MP Andrew Leigh pushed the line that taking fees and dividends fromBT Superannuation - an underperforming fund - was not acting in its members’ best interests.
King responded that BT is a subsidiary of Westpac. "It's not just the superannuation business, it also houses the platform business."
He also said that after a strategic review the decision was made that the group would "over time" move out of the superannuation business.
Leigh’s Labor colleague Daniel Mulino continued on this track, trying to get a sense of how much the superfund business had contributed to Westpac's profits via dividends paid by BT, which he estimated at $220 million over the past five years.
King repeated his earlier assertion that this was "a legal entity" that housed two separate businesses, superannuation and Westpac's platforms business, and that only $10 million of profits had come from the superannuation business.
Leigh later zeroed in on what he saw as the lack of transparency by Westpac on its flat fee foreign exchange product, which in his opinion gave a poor exchange rate but that was not mentioned in product information.
"The customer will know the converted cost plus a fee," said King, who went on to