Appearing before the royal commission on Tuesday, AMP head of advice compliance Sarah Britt admitted AMP failed to properly resource its advice remediation program.
The admission came after counsel assisting Rowena Orr pursued a line of questioning about an adviser, known only as ‘Mr E’, who advised a client to roll over his super to AMP’s MyNorth platform – incurring exit fees of $16,000 in the process (equating to 25 per cent of his total balance).
Ms Britt said AMP knew the advice was inappropriate in March 2017. However, more than one year later, the client has not been told he received inappropriate advice (or that he will be eligible for remediation).
The reason offered by Ms Britt was that AMP’s remediation program is not sufficiently resourced to handle the volume of poor advice at the company.
“We have not scaled up our remediation program as quickly as we should have,” she said.
“As a whole, the industry got caught by surprise by the scale and complexity of some of these remediation issues,” Ms Britt said.
“It isn’t acceptable that these clients still haven’t been looked at, still haven’t been contacted. We accept that. And that is why it is one of our strategic priorities this year to make sure that that gets fixed.”
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