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.
Shares of contract chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) came under pressure yesterday after a report that Apple Inc is looking to shift some orders from the Taiwanese company to Intel Corp. TSMC shares fell NT$55, or 2.4 percent, to close at NT$2,235 on the local main board, Taiwan Stock Exchange data showed. Despite the losses, TSMC is expected to continue to benefit from sound fundamentals, as it maintains a lead over its peers in high-end process development, analysts said. “The selling was a knee-jerk reaction to an Intel-Apple report over the weekend,” Mega International Investment Services Corp (兆豐國際投顧) analyst Alex Huang
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to remain Apple Inc’s primary chip manufacturing partner despite reports that Apple could shift some orders to Intel Corp, industry experts said yesterday. The comments came after The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Apple and Intel had reached a preliminary agreement following more than a year of negotiations for Intel to manufacture some chips for Apple devices. Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (台灣經濟研究院) economist Arisa Liu (劉佩真) said TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, including integrated fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, remain critical to the performance of Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. She said Intel and Samsung
POWER BUILDUP: Powered by Nvidia’s B200 Blackwell chips, the data center would support MediaTek’s computing power demand and business growth, the company said Smartphone chip designer MediaTek Inc (聯發科) yesterday launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) data center with a maximum capacity of 45 megawatts to meet its rising demand for computing power required to develop new advanced chips for AI applications. The company has completed the first-phase computing power buildup at the data center in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), providing 15 megawatts of capacity to support its research and development (R&D) capabilities, despite an industrywide shortage of key components, MediaTek said. Supply constraints have plagued a wide range of key components, including memory chips, solid-state drives, power supply units and central
IMAGE SENSORS: The Japanese company would be the controlling shareholder of the venture, with development and production lines to be set up in Kumamoto Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Sony Semiconductor Solutions Corp to create a joint venture to develop and produce next-generation images sensors. The partnership seeks to explore and address emerging opportunities in physical artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as automotive and robotics, paving the way for innovations and expanded technological advancements, TSMC said in a statement. Sony would be the majority and controlling shareholder of the joint venture, the statement said, adding that the company would set up development and production lines in its newly constructed fab in Kumamoto Prefecture’s
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