By Stephen Wright

WELLINGTON, New Zealand--New Zealand's financial markets regulator has asked a court to fine ANZ Bank for charging customers since 2001 for credit card repayment insurance that provided no cover.

A relatively small number of customers were affected, but the breach of financial conduct law was not disclosed by the bank during a regulatory review of New Zealand banks in 2018 despite it identifying the problem the previous year. The bank reported the breaches in June 2019.

In some cases, customers were issued duplicate policies which provided no additional cover while in others ANZ issued policies to ineligible customers and failed to cancel them.

The Financial Markets Authority said the problems dated to at least 2001, but its case in the High Court covers about five years from April 2014, which is when the Financial Markets Conduct Act became law.

"The case points to a failure of internal systems and controls resulting in customer harm over a significant period of time," it said.

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said more than 800 customers were wrongly charged. The FMA's case concerns a subset of 307 people.

The bank said it has paid 440,000 New Zealand dollars ($284,000) to affected customers and acknowledges it took too long to report the wrong charges. 



  Write to Stephen Wright at stephen.wright@wsj.com