Privacy laws are restricting banks' abilities to effectively deal with cases of financial abuse, Australia's second-largest bank has told a federal inquiry.
Westpac representatives have told a federal inquiry that privacy legislation is preventing banks from adequately dealing with financial abuse .
Westpac's general manager of Customer Solutions, Adrian Ahern, told the committee about a recent example of financial abuse that had been picked up through Westpac's internal alert system. Group Customer advocate Adrian Ahern told the committee about a case of a mother whose son was taking money out of her account."This is a perfect example of the sort of circumstance we'd love to be able to report to an adult safeguarding authority who could objectively get all the facts to investigate and take action, but, like many of the submissions have said to this inquiry, the Privacy Act stands in the way of that.
"The analogy to scams is an interesting one because we actually have quite a developed ecosystem between the banks to be able to send messaging between the banks and to effectively be able to chase funds," Ms Pogonoski said. "Access to relevant information enables us to identify risks of financial abuse faster, so we can deploy our specialist care teams and this is when we're at our best."Mr Ahern told the committee that Westpac had recently introduced heightened monitoring of customer accounts with power of attorney orders, which has proved useful in detecting instances of financial abuse.
"Yesterday I was speaking to one of our frontline team members, Sandy, who received a distress call from a customer asking for a loan repayment to be reserved," Ms Pogoniski told the committe. "This team is our best of the best, each member has deep experience and passion for helping people and I would back the capability and compassion of this team above any other like service in Australia.
Ms Pogonoski told the committee that Westpac staff were trained to identify "customer vulnerability".
Banking Bank Finance Financial Abuse Branch Inquiry Senator Deborah O'neill Lisa Pogonoski Adrian Ahern Adelaide Town Hall Customer Service Scam Customer Support
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