Financial Services Royal Commission Final Report

The final report and recommendations of the Financial Services Royal Commission were made public last week, and we wanted to take this opportunity to explain what this means for you, as a CUA member.

CUA welcomes many of the recommendations made by the Royal Commission as we believe these will help ensure the interests of all customers are kept front of mind.

As a mutual, CUA is 100 per cent owned by you - our members - with each member having an equal share in the organisation. Because CUA is owned by our members, not shareholders, we don’t have the conflict of balancing competing interests. We strive to put the best interests of you, our members, at the heart of everything we do.

CUA was not called before the Royal Commission to give evidence. Like many financial services businesses, we did however provide a submission to the Commission in February 2018 and the Commission has published all the submissions it received.

We’ve identified instances where mistakes were made – either through human error or technology issues – and we’ve worked to remedy these as quickly as possible. We also review the causes and circumstances surrounding any issue so it doesn’t happen again.

Over the past year, we have been examining areas where CUA can learn from the issues identified by the Royal Commission, so we can improve services to our members.

We will now carefully consider the Commission’s recommendations and how these may provide an opportunity for us to further improve on our services and our positive, member-centric culture.

At CUA, we support a strongly regulated financial services sector, as well as strong and empowered regulators. We agree CUA should be held to account just like other financial services providers. However we are also a smaller organisation focused on home loans and savings accounts to Australian families. As a member-owned organisation, our sole focus on members is a different model to the shareholder owned companies which were the focus of the Commission and where misconduct occurred.

We hope this helps clarifies what the Royal Commission means for us at CUA and you as a member and owner of our business. If you would like to know more, we’ve developed some Frequently Asked Questions or you can phone our dedicated Royal Commission Information Line on 1300 494 781.

Regards,

Nigel Ampherlaw
CUA Chairman