We value our customers, bank boss insists, but Choice disagrees

The time it takes to cancel an unwanted credit card is in focus, as big bank bosses testify in parliament today.

National Australia Bank CEO Andrew Thorburn was first up this morning at a hearing of the House Economics Committee’s banking inquiry, with an opening statement on the importance of his customers.

“Without customers, we have no bank,” The Australian reported Thorburn as telling the hearing. “More than this, we strive for our customers to trust and respect us.”

But consumer advocacy group Choice accuses the so-called Big Four banks – NAB, ANZ, Commonwealth Bank and Westpac – of attempting to cheat customers by running a “go slow” on credit card cancellations.

Credit card issues are expected to be a key focus for the parliamentary inquiry, with one member of the House committee, Queensland MP Scott Buchholz, complaining that banks continued to charge sky-high interest rates despite the historic low in Australia’s central bank base rate.

On Thursday Choice said the banks forced customers to go through lengthy credit card cancellation procedures unnecessarily to extend the amount of time they could charge high interest rates.

Choice particularly cited ANZ, which it said required customers to cut their card diagonally and post it back to the bank.

“In the age of online banking, it defies belief that ANZ, NAB, Westpac and Commonwealth all require you to call or email them when seeing to cancel a credit card,” Erin Turner, Choice’s head of campaigns and policy, said.

ANZ recently cut interest rates on two of its “low cost” credit cards to as low as 11.49 percent. Meanwhile, News Corp reported that Westpac was developing a new credit card that would have a rate of less than 10 percent.

Choice, however, has dismissed those moves as an attempt to head of criticism at the House inquiry.

The big banks have also come under fire after the Association of Securities and Investments Commission revealed on Wednesday that was taking action against Westpac for failing to check whether home loan customers could meet their repayments before signing them up for loans.

The bank allegedly failed to meet responsible lending requirements between December 2011 and March 2015.

An ASIC executive told the ABC that it planned to announce “work it had been doing” with some of the 11 other lenders it had investigated since the regulator started reviewing interest-only loans in 2015. That announcement would come in the next few weeks, the executive said.

Meanwhile, NAB’s CEO told the inquiry this morning that the bank had sacked two senior managers and disciplined three others for not meeting the bank’s code of conduct.

Do you think Australia’s big banks value their customers? Have you tried to cancel a credit card recently – was it easy? What would you like the parliamentary inquiry to ask the bank CEOs?