When a bank breaches the Code

If you have a complaint about your bank

The Committee collects information about potential Code breaches to improve a bank’s future practices – not to get a specific outcome for an individual customer. If you want your individual problem to be addressed – for example, if you want compensation, an apology, or for your problem to be fixed – you should instead make a complaint to your bank.

First, contact your bank. All banks must have a process (known as internal dispute resolution) to try to resolve complaints from customers.

If you’re not satisfied with your bank’s response, you can take your complaint to the Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA). AFCA is a free, fair and independent service that helps resolve disputes between customers and their banks (known as external dispute resolution).

Report your issue to the Committee

If you would like to contribute to our work driving better practice in the banking industry, you can report your concern that a bank breached the Code to the Committee.

When we can investigate

Anyone can contact the Committee about a bank breaching the Code. As part of our role making sure banks follow the Code, we may decide to investigate specific concerns.

We can only investigate an issue if:

• the bank has adopted the Code
• the bank provided the service in Australia
• the issue involves an individual customer, guarantor or small business
• the issue is covered by the Code
• the issue isn’t currently being investigated by someone else, like a court or AFCA, and
• you became aware of the issue no more than two years ago.

What happens when you report an issue

When you report an issue, we’ll review the information you send us and acknowledge receipt of your completed form.

We focus on matters that may be serious or systemic, and as a result we may:

• use this information to inform us where to focus our compliance monitoring activities in future
• conduct a compliance investigation into a bank we suspect may not be complying with the Code and, if we find that the Code was breached, work with the bank to find the cause and fix it so that other customers aren’t affected by the same issue in future
• consider this, and other information we received, and conduct an inquiry into conduct with the industry where there may be breaches of the Code, and/or
• publish a case study about your experience (with any identifying information removed) to let people know about where banks’ practices need to improve.

Communicating with us – understanding the options

We are committed to being accessible to everyone and recognise people have different needs. We have arrangements in place to help – we will work with you to make sure we adapt, where possible, to meet your needs.

If English is not your first language (including Auslan), we can arrange a free translator to assist you in communications with us. To access this, call the interpreter service on 131 450.

Alternatively, call us on 1800 931 678.  This is a telephone service provided by AFCA – please ask to speak to the Code Compliance and Monitoring team.

You can also:

• nominate email as your preferred method of communicating with us
• notify us of the best contact times to call you, within business hours.