Allianz investigating historic compliance issues

Allianz chief risk officer, Lori Callahan, has admitted to the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry that the insurer had about 150 open compliance matters under consideration that may need to be referred to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The firm was also looking back through past compliance issues to see if anything should have been reported to the regulator but wasn’t. Discovering such a failure to report would also be uncovering a breach of section 192D of the Corporations Act however, as section 192 requires that any “significant”, even if only potential, breach be reported to ASIC within 10 business days.

Callahan did not know how many historic issues Allianz was looking at however, in a day of testimony characterised by her often being unable to answer the Commission’s questions.

“I’m a little surprised that you can’t give me any indication of the size of the task,” Commissioner Kenneth Hayne QC told her.

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Callahan said that Allianz was “at the start” of introducing appropriate compliance practices. This year, for example, it had already made seven breach reports to ASIC, outstripping its average of one annually for previous years (which ranged from zero to four or five per year).