ANZ pays $29.4 million over faulty loan calculator

ANZ will pay a further $29.4 million to customers after using a faulty loan calculator between 2015 and 2016.

Monday, March 2nd 2020, 2:38PM

The lender has come to an agreement with the Commerce Commission to compensate customers after its old loan calculator failed to include some interest to be charged to customers.

Between June 2015 and May 2016, the bank effectively under-charged customers when calculating their loan repayments.

As part of the redress, ANZ has previously agreed to pay $6 million to affected customers. The $29 million is in addition to previously scheduled payments, ANZ said.

It follows a disastrous period for ANZ New Zealand. The bank was censured by the Reserve Bank over capital modelling failings last year; while former CEO David Hisco left last year amid an expenses scandal.

ANZ's retail boss apologised for the loan calculator error.

Ben Kelleher, managing director for retail and business banking at ANZ, said: “We’ve worked with the Commerce Commission since 2017 to help them understand what happened and how it impacted our customers. In 2018, we wrote to impacted customers, and if customers were underpaying because of the problem, we gave them a credit, so customers paid less than they'd agreed to under their loan agreement.”

“While we believe our initial payment to impacted customers was fair and better than overseas examples, after discussions with the Commission, we'll make a further payment to around 86,000 accounts to recognise that we didn't meet our lender responsibilities under section 9C(2)(a)(ii) of the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003.

“ANZ is sorry this issue happened. We worked quickly to fix the problem, owned up to it, and we've made sure no customers are disadvantaged. We’ll begin to make the further payments to relevant customers over coming months.”

Tags: ANZ Ben Kelleher Lending mortgages