Australia’s corporate regulator has warned banks and other lenders to keep lifting their support for customers in financial distress, saying that while standards have improved since last year’s review, significant gaps remain.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) today released Report 815, Hardship, not so hard to get help, which details progress by lenders after concerns were set out in May 2024 in Report 782, Hardship, hard to get help: Findings and actions to support customers in financial hardship, and its summary, Report 783.
“Since our review, we have seen lenders work to uplift their hardship practices and to better support their customers experiencing hardship,” Commissioner Kate O’Rourke said. “However, we have some concerns about the overall quality of lenders’ hardship responses.”
ASIC said lenders have made changes including:
– increasing customer awareness of the availability of hardship assistance
– correcting policies and training materials
– improving identification of hardship notices
– offering greater flexibility in how information is collected, and
– removing default requests for large amounts of customer information.
The regulator required lenders that received tailored feedback to submit action plans, and in some cases to obtain independent assurance that fixes were implemented and effective.
“For example, consumer groups and financial counsellors continue to tell us there are still lenders taking a cookie-cutter approach to hardship, rather than tailoring responses to the customer’s individual circumstances.
“ASIC will continue to monitor lenders’ actions in this area.”
Commissioner O’Rourke said, “We urge all lenders to adopt a proactive, continuous improvement approach to supporting their customers experiencing financial hardship, and to ensure adequate focus on customer experience and outcomes in their practices.
“Financial hardship assistance continues to be a key focus area for ASIC, particularly as some consumers continue to experience cost-of-living pressures.”
ASIC said it will keep tracking lenders’ action plans and reviewing reports from independent reviewers.
The watchdog pointed to enforcement already taken for alleged breaches of hardship obligations, naming NAB and its subsidiary AFSH Nominees (25-254MR), Westpac (23-242MR), ANZ (25-201MR) and non-bank lender Resimac (25-081MR). In August 2025, the Federal Court ordered NAB to pay $15.5 million for failing to respond to hardship notices within the required timeframe. In September 2025, ASIC and ANZ jointly asked the Federal Court to impose a $40 million penalty on ANZ over failures to respond to hardship notices on time and to maintain proper hardship processes.
ASIC first flagged a heightened focus on financial hardship in an August 2023 letter to lender CEOs, alongside a data collection from 30 large lenders and an end-to-end review of the policies, processes and practices of 10 of them. Its May 2024 findings concluded most lenders acknowledged the need to do more, but most were not doing enough.
