Commonwealth Bank of Australia chief executive officer Matthew Comyn yesterday said he is committed to restoring trust in the lender after a series of bruising scandals and mistreatment of customers.
Comyn was the first chief executive of Australia’s four big banks to appear in front of a parliamentary committee after a report last month strongly criticized the industry for pursuing profit at the expense of basic standards of honesty.
“We have seen far too many instances of unacceptable customer outcomes,” Comyn told the committee in Canberra.
There were “failures of judgment, failures of process, failures of leadership and in some instances greed,” he said.
The government-appointed inquiry uncovered a litany of wrongdoing, ranging from charging dead people for services to lying to regulators about misconduct, triggering a sharp fall in banks’ share prices this year.
Over the past two weeks, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd and Westpac Banking Corp have said that profits would be hit by additional costs related to cleaning up their businesses.
“I’d like once again to apologize unreservedly to the customers we’ve let down,” Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer told the committee.
The Royal Commission report was “incredibly confronting” he said.
While overall economic growth remains sound, we are seeing increasing uncertainty,” Hartzer said. “Regulatory changes that impact how much individuals can borrow, the cost and availability of credit for business, or the availability and affordability of suitable financial advice should be considered carefully.”
ANZ Bank chief executive Shayne Elliott is to testify today and National Australia Bank Ltd chief executive Andrew Thorburn appears next week.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last