The person would be in charge of monitoring brokers and reporting misconduct, according to leaked PC report
Mortgage brokers may soon have to contend with even more oversight and scrutiny if the banks end up appointing an “integrity officer” as recommended by the Productivity Commission in its final report into Competition in the Financial System.
The information was obtained and reported by the Australian Financial Review on Friday (3 August) prior to the scheduled public release of the final report.
According to the newspaper, the commission has recommended that this “integrity officer” monitor mortgage brokers and banks.
“A new integrity officer, which would be a senior executive position, would have a statutory obligation to report problems inside their bank to regulators if they aren't satisfied with the board's response,” the AFR reported.
While there was no mention of an “integrity officer” in the Commission’s draft report, ASIC’s chairman James Shipton told the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics in June that the regulator “would like to have the ability to put supervisory teams into the large financial institutions”.
Shipton said at the time that ASIC was in very productive talks with the government about executing new ideas and strategies to address the issues identified in financial services and it would use all its tools and powers to do so.
“We want to address in a strategic and tactical way the challenges that are clearly confronting the industry and have caused a deficiency in the trust and confidence by the Australian public.
The PC’s draft report raised concerns about vertical integration of bank-owned aggregators, questioned the purpose of trail, and suggested the threshold of care be lifted to ‘best interest’ from ‘not unsuitable’ for some brokers in the industry.
According to an article in The Australian in July, the final report also allegedly recommends the elimination of trail.
The final report will be released today.
More to come…
