“For Westpac’s Brian Hartzer, a bitter end to an impressive career”, 26 November 2019

The AUSTRAC affair and the widespread revulsion it has generated has claimed Westpac’s chief executive [(Brian Hartzer)], the chair of its risk and compliance committee [(Ewen Crouch)] and…its chairman [(Lindsay Maxsted)]. Maxsted’s attempt to buy some time to determine where responsibility for Westpac’s multiple breaches of its obligation to know its customers lay was short-lived; overwhelmed by the external demands for heads to roll…, reinforced by the threat that governments and businesses would cease dealing with the bank.

Hartzer has said it was only in mid-October that he learnt that AUSTRAC was concentrating on transactions that might have involved payments by Westpac customers that involved child exploitation. [T]he crux of AUSTRAC's allegations was that [Westpac] didn’t know – it couldn’t know, because its systems weren’t capable of properly identifying transactions that might be related to payments related to child exploitation. [It] could be argued…that they should have been aware – that it was their responsibility to have systems and processes in place to ensure they were aware...

Hartzer, Maxsted and Crouch are decent and diligent people with distinguished careers but they aren’t the first chief executive or directors to fall foul of the anti-money laundering laws and won’t be the last. [It] appears big bank systems, processes and risk management teams aren’t capable of guaranteeing perfect compliance with laws that require them to be able to screen every transaction. [If] you look at the…legislative and regulatory changes that the major banks have had to deal with since the financial crisis, it is perhaps even less surprising that Westpac [was]…caught out by technology and human failures in their anti-money laundering processes.