ANZ is undertaking a sweeping review of its mortgage products after a major glitch forced it to refund $70m to 235,000 home loan customers.
The errors relate to issues with mortgage offset accounts which came as a result of manual processing, according to a Fairfax report.
ANZ head of Australian operations Phil Chronican told Fairfax there was often a delay between customers’ loans being drawn down and linking the offset accounts.
‘‘In most cases these things were fixed within a week, but the customer didn’t always get that credit,” said Chronican.
In response to the offset account issues ANZ has launched a “thorough” review of all of its deposit products, credit cards and any remaining mortgage products that have not already been assessed.
‘‘When you discover an issue of this nature, you want to be 100 per cent sure that you haven’t got anything else of that nature in your business, so we’ve been reviewing all of our products,’’ said Chronican.
‘‘We literally are going through every product, every terms and conditions booklet, and checking the systems against the products against the terms and conditions.’’
The review has been running for a little over a year and so far has only turn up some relatively “small issues” in commercial accounts, said Chronican.
The probe will cost the banks several million dollars in staff hours.
