Australia and New Zealand Banking : ANZ unveils dispute resolution principles

The new principles provide a template for ANZ's staff members and external lawyers involved in any disputes, complaints or legal matters with individual retail and small business customers to act fairly and as model litigants.

ANZ Deputy Chief Executive Officer Alexis George said: 'When we are attempting to resolve customer disputes, we want to act in the spirit of the law not just the letter of the law, which means considering community expectations.

'Today we are making a public commitment on how we want to conduct ourselves during disputes and, importantly, we have shared these principles with our external legal partners so they know how we want to be represented.

'Our Customer Fairness Advisor, Colin Neave put a lot of work into creating these principles, including valuable input from customer groups, so we are confident they will work well for us and our customers.'

ANZ's principles have been written in plain English to make them easily accessible and understandable to all parties involved in a relevant dispute resolution process. They will continue to evolve with experience and input from interested parties such as community groups.

These principles represent a small, but important part of ANZ's response to the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. ANZ will provide a further update on its response to the Royal Commission at its Interim Result on 1 May.

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