But Dracula is in charge of the blood bank and is making assessment decisions??? Seriously? Well that will go well…………………
CBA expects to pay $23m in compensation for giving poor advice
The Australian 12:00am February 8, 2017
Richard Gluyas
Commonwealth Bank is close to a final reckoning for its debilitating financial advice debacle, announcing yesterday that all file assessments had been completed and $23 million would be offered in compensation.
The open advice review program (OARP), set up in 2014 to compensate victims of poor financial advice from Commonwealth Financial Planning and Financial Wisdom between 2003 and 2012, will now move to the final stage of responding to customer queries about their assessments.
The independent Promontory Financial Group will release a final review of advice assessed through the OARP next month.
Leif Gamertsfelder, CBA’s executive general manager for advice review, said the provisional compensation figure of $23m included interest and covered more than 8600 assessments. “The update from Promontory today is another step towards our goal of putting things right for customers who received poor advice in the past and providing reassurance to the large majority of customers who received appropriate advice at the time,” he said.
Chief executive Ian Narev unveiled the OARP in July 2014, a week after a report by the Senate economics references committee called for a royal commission into CBA’s financial planning arm.
Of the 350,000 customers contacted to see if they wanted to participate, 22,000 expressed interest, leading to the 8660 file reviews. Some initial estimates put the probable compensation bill at hundreds of millions of dollars, based on an earlier program that resulted in $52m of payments to more than 1100 customers. That program targeted advisers who were known to be dodgy. The OARP was open-ended and is therefore likely to result in a much lower compensation bill.
The bank also faced criticism over the length of the process to compensate victims. Its response has been that the program had to be appropriately scaled, with staff numbers reaching a peak level of 650 — about 70 per cent more than with the Financial Ombudsman Service.
In addition, paper files had to be retrieved from around the country and scanned to create a digital filing system.
CBA’s future advice model, to be rolled out this year, will be fully digitised and much simpler, with advice expressed in plain English.