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Westpac tasks senior executive Carolyn McCann with leading customer focus
The Australian 10:38am May 18, 2018
Michael Roddan
Westpac has appointed its chief corporate affairs manager Carolyn McCann to the newly created position of group executive of customer and corporate relations, where she will be “resolving customer issues” and “managing the bank’s relationship with customers and the broader community”.
Ms McCann is currently the bank’s general manager of corporate affairs and sustainability, and the creation of the new role comes as Australia’s largest banks look to overhaul their behaviour as the royal commission continues to uncover uncomfortable scandals at the lenders.
The big four banks — Westpac (WBC), Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and National Australia Bank — have already set up internal customer advocates as an alternative to external dispute processes.
Ms McCann joined Westpac, the country’s second largest bank, in 2013 and has been responsible for its external communications, government relations and external affairs. She is a previous corporate affairs boss at Insurance Australia Group.
Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer said the newly created customer and corporate relations division would open lines of communications with all of it’s the banks stakeholders so it could “identify and resolve the root causes of any new issues”.
“Appointing a Group Executive to oversee our customer resolution teams, alongside our corporate affairs and sustainability functions, is an important step in meeting our commitment to delivering superior customer service.” Mr Hartzer said.
“We are committed to running Westpac in a way that is fair to customers and supports them over the long term,” he said.
“It’s clear that in a number of instances we have been too slow in resolving genuine customer issues. This is not good enough. Customers have a right to expect fair, timely, and effective resolution if they believe they have a concern or complaint,” he said.
The royal commission into banking and financial services has turned the spotlight onto Westpac several times during the two months of hearings so far.
Westpac was the “most resistant” of the big four banks to obeying the law and had “poor culture” and weak risk controls, Australian Securities and Investments Commission staff told chairman Greg Medcraft in a May 2015 memo, according a briefing note tendered to the inquiry.
The royal commission heard testimony by a nurse who claimed she will have to work until she is 80 and in “a wheelchair or a Zimmer frame” after being comprehensively ripped off by a Westpac financial planner who was still at the bank. Westpac also did not pass on its “serious concerns” about one of its financial planners to the advice group that hired him after he left the bank, the financial services royal commission heard. The bank has also made no move to stop paying car dealers huge commissions they set for themselves, despite last year telling the corporate regulator they should be prohibited. Meanwhile, an prudential analysis released by the royal commission of 420 Westpac loans showed almost a third were not checked for proof of borrower income and the majority were assessed against a much criticised benchmark, which led APRA boss Wayne Byres to conclude that Westpac was an “outlier” in lending standards compared to the other major banks.
