BANKS often face conflicts of interest when it comes to advising their customers. The regulators who are supposed to stop the abuses that can result are not always up to the job. But when wrongdoing does finally come to light, the penalties can be vast. Financial institutions in Britain have had to lay aside £40bn ($ 52bn) to compensate customers mis-sold payment protection insurance. Wells Fargo was fined $ 1bn by American regulators and ordered to reimburse the people to whom it had sold useless insurance or mortgages with inflated fees. Now it is the turn of Australian banks to face a reckoning.
A royal commission has exposed a litany of abuses. Its interim report, published on September 28th, paints the country’s financial institutions as consumer-crushing oligopolies. Lenders charged hidden fees long after providing services, and for some services they never provided at all, on occasion to people who were dead. They siphoned off at least A$ 1bn ($ 720m) of compulsory pension…
