Day 445: 'Too busy to notice’
Counting the days since the banking royal commission was established.
Good afternoon, and welcome to day 445.
Today in summary: NAB’s Phil Chronican goes from interim chief to chair; the FPA has launched an online education portal to help advisers comply with new FASEA standards; and CBA exposed again for ignoring a 2015 report on its culture and governance, two years before APRA came in for the bank.
-- Alex
@AlexESampson
Current banker panic level: 😊👩🏼🎓🤐
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1. NAB’s interim chief will become its ongoing chair, with Phil Chronican announced last night as the replacement for outgoing chair Ken Henry. Chronican has promised to make “meaningful” change at the bank. NAB director David Armstrong said Chronican was the “most outstanding candidate”. It had been thought that Chronican might have thrown his hat in the ring for chief, but yesterday he said being a long-term CEO was not part of his “life plan” after retiring from being a full-time executive four years ago, stating that he “wasn’t up to” the 70-80-hour-a-week workload.
2. The Financial Planning Association of Australia has seen the market for financial adviser education and launched “Return to Learn”, an online education portal designed to simplify the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority’s incoming higher education requirements.
In a statement today, the FPA said the portal “promises easy access to accurate information on the latest education and ethics policy developments and implications, as well as study tools”. It includes explanations of FASEA policies, Code of Ethics and education tools in one central hub as well as a guide to study credits.
The FASEA standards were announced by the federal government in 2017 and were reiterated in Commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s final report. They include compulsory education for both new advisors (which came into effect January 1, 2019) and existing advisers (due by January 1, 2024), as well as an industry exam (due to be sat by January 1, 2021).
3. The Australian is reporting that the Commonwealth Bank was the subject of a wide-ranging cultural review by the St James Ethics Centre in 2015, but refused to let them oversee the implementation of its recommendations. The centre has said it produced a “thick” report that had never been released publicly. The report came two years before the prudential regulator APRA was forced to review CBA’s culture and governance following a series of scandals including widespread breaches of anti-money laundering rules.
Today’s burn prize: Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen
🔥🔥🔥
“There was the Prime Minister warning of a recession the other day under the Labor Party, too busy to notice they’ve gone into a per capita, a per head recession while he was Prime Minister.”
Bowen took the opportunity at a doorstop in Sydney to hit back at Scott Morrison’s claims that the Opposition will sink the economy if elected. He dismissed the commentary, saying “all they’ve got is negativity”.
The Commentariat
The Australian’s senior business commentator John Durie writes that the appointment of NAB’s interim chief executive Phil Chronican to ongoing chair is an overdue show of rationality from the embattled bank.
“Chronican is the ideal choice as chair. He’s a banking veteran who went through a similar revival effort when he was a key executive in Westpac’s Best Bank program in the early 1990s.”
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