ANZ Group Holdings Limited (ANZ) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for joining us at our ESG Investor Forum. Now before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that I'm joining you from the lands of the Wurundjeri people. I also acknowledge the traditional owners of the various lands in which our attendees are joining from today, and I pay my respects to elders past and present and to aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today. Now we engage with the market regularly on the financial performance of ANZ, including, of course, at our results presentations. Our ESG specific sessions originated in 2018 to provide the opportunity for those focused on that space to engage with management. And with me today is our group executive Institutional, Mark Whelan, Head of Financial Well-being, Mohamed Khalil [Audio Gap] Let me start by touching on what the key points we wanted to highlight today. I'll provide you an overview of how we bring purpose, strategy and ESG together in an integrated way. A quick reminder on how we govern ESG, and finally I'll share little more on one of the more topical areas at the moment affordable housing. My colleagues, Mark, Mo and Kath, will cover environmental sustainability, financial well-being and customer fairness. So firstly, to our approach. As you know, we have a strong and embedded sense of purpose to shape a world where people and communities thrive. And that drives everything that we do. We deliver our purpose by executing our strategy of improving the financial well-being and the sustainability of our customers. Specifically, helping people save for, buy and own a sustainable, livable and affordable home, helping people to start or buy and sustainably grow their business and helping companies move goods and capital around the region sustainably. Then we weave purpose and strategy together to create value for all stakeholders, as shown on our value creation model. Now this is supported by a range of metrics reviewed regularly by the Board and management. Three areas of financial well-being, affordable and sustainable housing and environmental sustainability are therefore fundamental to our business and strategy and form the basis of our ESG work. In addition, acknowledging the operating environment is constantly changing and to keep pace with community expectations, we formally engage with stakeholders annually to help determine the most pressing ESG issues of the day. That work highlighted 3 additional issues this year: Customer experience; offering affordable, accessible and responsible financial products and services that meet customer needs, information security, responding and adapting to scams, frauds and cyberattacks and ethics conduct and culture. Our governance model is then calibrated to oversee our work in these 6 areas. Specifically, our ESG governance dedicated to this includes our Board's Ethics and ESG Committee led by the Chairman, and that's responsible for setting the policies and principles for our approach. It's focused on overseeing our response to risks and opportunities as well as understanding our most material ESG issues. I then share an executive Ethics and Responsible Business Committee, which is a decision-making group that operationalizes our approach. Now over the last 12 months, the Board committee has been spending more time on our approach to scams and understanding the challenges and opportunities for customers on climate and biodiversity. My committee has spent more time focused on our carbon offsetting strategy, family violence and financial abuse and our commitment to improving the financial well-being of customers. Both bodies are provided with regular updates on ANZ's performance against key external ratings, such as S&P and CDP, which provide an indication of how external stakeholders perceive our performance. Now governance is further embedded in the business through our group scorecard, staff training programs and our ethical decision-making framework. Ensuring our governance processes, such as the ethical decision-making framework are embedded in our day-to-day work not only helps us create long-term value, it also enables us to manage risk. For example, we recently assessed the impact of customers using credit cards to fund cryptocurrency purchases. That discussion covered the volume of these transactions, questions around customer harm, options for an ANZ response and the impact of any response on customers. Now before handing over to my colleagues, I wanted to touch on one of our most material ESG issues, affordable housing. Now it goes without saying that housing remains a key priority for us in both Australia and New Zealand. It remains one of the great challenges for our generation to ensure that everyone in Australia and New Zealand, irrespective of background and circumstance, has access to affordable, livable and sustainable homes. These challenges have recently been exacerbated by higher interest rates, impacting those particularly with high levels of debt, first homebuyers or those more exposed to cost of living challenges or those who have less stable employment. Now there was hope that higher interest rates would lead to a moderation in house prices. However, after a 9% fall in capital city values, it appears that house prices and rents are rising again due to supply shortages, and this is a significant challenge and not easily resolved. But ANZ is playing a role by increasing our lending to affordable housing on both sides of the talisman. And supporting new business models like Assemble here in Australia, or our Blueprint to Build program in New Zealand, which has helped more than 8,000 kiwis build new homes with discounted lending. More broadly, we've already committed $10 billion to fund affordable housing by 2030, and we're pleased to have booked $4.4 billion to date. In New Zealand, we've supported [ 4,800 ] households with over $200 million in new lending since we launched in 2022. But there is more that we can do and we will. Housing is not only an important business for us, but it's also core to our customer proposition and core to what the community expects from banks. And therefore, it's one of the areas that we care about most. We will, of course, continue to seek opportunities to expand our presence in the sector and contribute positively and constructively to the national dialogue. It's an area that rightfully occupies significant time at the Board and with our executive team. And it's a great example of where purpose, strategy and business opportunity come together. Now I'll hand over to Mark to talk in more detail about the work underway in sustainability.

Okay. Thanks, Shayne. Today, I'll update you on our environmental sustainability strategy, in particular, our climate commitments and customer engagement. We're continuing to support our customers in the transition to net zero. For example, we played a leading role in a $540 million financing for Lightsource bp to support the development of solar farms in New South Wales and Victoria. And we helped fund our Queensland customer, Tandy Group, to upgrade to more fuel-efficient equipment. This was through our partnership with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. In April, we launched a new target to fund and facilitate at least an additional $100 billion in sustainable finance by the end of 2030. This includes financing to help lower carbon emissions, protect nature and biodiversity, increase access to affordable housing and support financial well-being. This will bring our total sustainable finance commitments to $166 billion since October 2015. Let me now turn to our decarbonization pathways and targets. We have 6 sectorial pathways in place for power generation, large-scale commercial property, oil and gas, aluminum, cement and steel. Our next steps are pathways for thermal coal and 3 transport subsectors, order manufacturing, airlines and shipping, and we plan to disclose these in November. We're also strengthening our due diligence and transaction decision-making process in the energy sector. Major energy transactions are scrutinized to, among other things, assess the robustness of a customer's transition plan, especially the milestones and trajectory of their commitments and disclosures. Transactions that are considered material are escalated for review to myself, our Chief Risk Officer and the Group General Manager, ESG. If required, senior level meetings are then held with the customer. Now one of these approvals was -- recently was for a new-to-bank energy customer. Their transition plan included Scope 1, 2 and 3 targets: 100% renewables to power their operations within the next few years, short and medium-term targets and good disclosures. More broadly, we are upgrading how we identify and evaluate customer climate risks. This will further integrate our climate and credit risk assessments while also supporting frontline conversations with our customers. The approach has been piloted for all project finance credit assessments. And over time, we will expand this to cover more institutional customers in higher emitting sectors. We are also further improving the tool with a focus on simplification, digitization and consolidation of existing climate-related analytical tools. We'll make further disclosures about this at year-end. Now many of you will be familiar with the program in place since 2018 focusing on engagement with 100 of our largest emitting business customers. In 2022, we broadened our engagement with these customers to include a focus on biodiversity. The aim is to encourage and support customers to identify and manage their potential biodiversity impacts and dependencies. Through our engagement, we have had 3 key observations to date. First, customers are increasingly willing to improve oversight and management of biodiversity for example, putting formal governance in place. Second, resource sector customers are particularly well placed, partly due to their focus on regulatory compliance for more than 2 decades. They have progressively strengthened their commitments to what they will not do. For example, restricting exploration or extraction of resources to protect high-value biodiversity areas. Third, our customers are less progressed in setting biodiversity targets and disclosures compared with their climate response. And this is not unexpected. However, it is likely that the adoption of the task force and nature-related financial disclosures framework will see progress over time. While it's early days, we are also starting to see customers considering biodiversity KPIs in sustainability loans. For example, we participated in North Queensland Airport's sustainability loan in September of 2022, which included a KPI on natural habitat restoration. We also joined a pilot study of the TNFD frameworks application to a particular sector of the economy. The aim was to help us learn how to conduct better informed conversations with customers. Finally, I'd like to leave you with some insights from recent discussions held with regulators and peers in the U.K. and Europe. These conversations help us get a pulse check on what may come next year in Australia. Our peers and regulators are at an early stage on biodiversity. So good practice is still forming. Our customer engagement was viewed positively by regulators, and we plan to build on it, as I said a little earlier. In addition, the importance of building capability to support the transition continues to be key. This includes bringing in external partnerships for their specialist expertise such as our partnership with pollination. So to summarize, we continue to support the transition to net zero. We believe we are well positioned for future challenges and opportunities. And I want to emphasize that we will continue to take a measured approach and that above all, we are conscious of getting the balance right. With that, I'll hand over to Mo.

Thanks, Mark. ANZ is committed to improving the financial well-being of our customers, colleagues and communities, helping them make the most of their money throughout their lives is core to our strategy and is one way ANZ brings its purpose to life. The solutions we are delivering help them meet their obligations, achieve their goals and enjoy life today, tomorrow and through tough times with greater confidence and control. Our efforts are informed by thoughtful research and deep expertise to ensure we have a meaningful impact. This includes the experts in Financial being in behavioral science we have embedded into our innovation processes. Our continued research on financial being with deep dive reports on the financial being of women in Australia, people with disability or long-term health conditions and the digital capability of older Australians. And the ANZ Roy Morgan Financial being indicator that provides a regular pulse check on the financial being of Australians and New Zealanders. This focus on evidence-based innovation has paid off for our customers. ANZ Plus is one of the fastest growing [Audio Gap] with over 300,000 customers, nearly 30% of whom have a savings goal in place. And engagement with our financial well-being hub has grown and will evolve as we build better personalization to ensure customers receive the guidance they need when they need it. We also continue to support the financial being of our communities, in line with our commitments to our reconciliation action plan, accessibility and inclusion plan and financial inclusion action plan. Our financial education programs delivered with government and community partners, helped to improve the financial inclusion and capability of lower-income individuals. Most recently, we refreshed money business and included additional content in money-minded to better address the challenges of family violence. We continue to provide training and employment opportunities for underrepresented groups through our indigenous traineeships, given the chance and return to work programs. Return to work, which recently attracted a record number of applications, has a retention rate of more than 80%, an average employment tenure that exceeds to industry benchmarks. Finally, we became a signatory to United Nations commitment to financial health and inclusion, which will provide additional transparency and our impact on customer and community financial well being. Financial well-being is very much at the heart of the bank we're building. It is our strategy, and we are committed to delivering solutions that better support outcomes as we continue to shape a world where people and communities thrive. Kath will now share insights on what we are doing to improve the customer experience with a focus on fairness and extra support for customers in need.

Thanks, Mo. Improving customer experience is, of course, a high priority for us, and we strive to treat our customers fairly in all our dealings with them. As Shayne touched on, we're particularly conscious of the impact of a rising rate environment and a cost of living pressures on our customers. Over the past 18 months, we have proactively contacted more than 20,000 home loan customers each month to check in and ensure the ongoing suitability of their loan arrangements. This includes customers with fixed rate or interest-only loans nearing maturity. Improvements to our data capabilities have enabled our ability to proactively identify customers whose transaction patterns indicate potential future stress. While the very large majority of these will be completely benign, for the few, this has been a crucial early intervention to get customers back on track quickly. Assistance ranges from proactive early hardship offerings to simple repayment reminders to ensure sufficient funds are in the payment account. These reminders have been particularly successful with a 31% improvement in on-time payment for those we reached out to. We've also established an extra care hub a specialist team to strengthen ANZ's practical support for customers impacted by family violence. This includes making changes to banking arrangements and assistance to rebuild financial independence. Ongoing staff training underpins this work, not just in the extra care hub itself, but across all our interaction points with customers who need additional support. Our priority is always to help our customers get back on track. And over 70% of customers who contact us in hardship are back in good shape with their home loans within 12 months. Separately, we continue to improve the accessibility of both our digital and physical environments. With our new commitments set out in our accessibility and inclusion plan, they include embedding audio, visual and mobility support in our digital banking products. We've made some great progress on this front in the build and design and rollout of ANZ Plus, which is accessible by design. And our award-winning new branch formats have also been designed and built out with a focus on inclusion and accessibility. While our aim is to deliver excellent products and services to our customers, we, of course, at times, get things wrong. And when we do, we seek to resolve complaints with empathy and fairness. Over the last 2 years, we've been changing the way we manage customer complaints by improving our capabilities. This includes the appointment of former AFCA Lead Ombudsman, Evelyn Halls, as Customer Fairness Advisor, adding an inclusive design assessment to our product life cycle and establishing the customer advocacy forum to oversee issues that impact retail and small business customers. The last area I'll touch on is how we're responding to the growing volume of scams. As scammers change the way they target victims, we're also changing how we protect our customers with new systems and technologies, including biometric tools that allow us to identify unusual activity during transactions and in our digital channels. In the past 12 months, we have increased by 94% the number of rules and algorithms we have in place to detect scams in our digital channels and similarly have increased by 300% the number in our card payment channels. And we've increased our reimbursement and goodwill payments for fraud, scams and unauthorized transactions. We regularly update our security alerts to warn customers about emerging scam and fraud threats. Alongside this, we aim to increase customer education about scams through awareness campaigns and collaboration with bodies such as Scamwatch. We're also working with others across the industry on a range of initiatives to help protect the community. As an example, we're a member of the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange. They have recently launched a fraud reporting exchange platform that we're now using as a centralized system that offers near real-time reporting and actioning of fraud and scam recovery. This has seen resolution timeframes for most scam cases reduced by over 50%. As Shayne and Mo have already mentioned, we anticipate further challenges for some of our customers, given the current and forecast economic climate. So we're particularly alive to ensuring respectful fair and appropriate outcomes for our customers. I'll now hand back to Shayne for Q&A.

Thanks, Kath. And operator, we'll open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Rob Koh with Morgan Stanley.

Maybe can I try 2 questions, just 1 in relation to housing affordability. If your data insights could -- or what are your data insights telling you about which particular areas of the community, maybe by geography or by other categories, are most impacted at the margin?

Sure. Actually, it's a good question. I -- Kevin I noticed if he wants to add to my answer, actually [indiscernible]. Actually, it's interesting, Rob, in that there don't appear to be any particular indicator. So there's certainly no geographic overlay like we've seen in the past. And you'd be aware that over the last 10 or 15 years, when we've had periods of stress, it's more acutely felt perhaps in Western Australia or other parts of the country. That's not the case at the moment. So there's no sort of geographic overlay. Surprisingly, despite much talk about the fixed rates, the so-called cliff, our evidence to date in our own book is that people who have actually moved from a fixed rate to a floating rate are actually performing on average better than others. And there's some reasonable hypothesis of why that might be the case in terms of their ability to prepare well in advance for that. So that hasn't typically been an indicator. It's really a relatively, and again, I don't mean to diminish it, but it's a relatively small set of indicators. People who bought more recently are more likely at the top, those that had to sort of really stretch themselves to get into the market. And then, of course, the real indicator is those that have less secure employment. At the end of the day, what we found is those that do have a home loan need irrespective of when they got it, have largely been quite well equipped to manage despite the number of rate rises. It's really as long as they have a job, they've been able to work themselves through, and that sort of reinforced even when we look at things like our hardship cases. But Kevin, did you have any -- sorry, Kevin is just being mic-ed up. So do you want to add anything?

Shayne, the only other thing I'd add is it's still the same factors that we saw before in terms of loss of income, marital breakdown or health issues are the key drivers. So there's been no change to that in terms of the reasons why some customers have found themselves in stressful situations. Otherwise, what you said, I think, covers all the key points.

To answer your second question, Rob?

Yes. Okay. So my next question. Obviously, in dealing with this and anticipating this, you've talked a lot about extra algorithms and extra data analytics. Can you just give us an update on how you're thinking about potential risks with that like things like algorithmic bias and the like?

Yes. So that's a very good question. I think the point there was some level were here. This was relating to Kevin's comments in particular around scams, right? And so as we know, -- there's -- sadly, there's a significant industry of scammers out there, and they continually evolve in the way that they're tricking and defrauding customers. And what we try to do in addition to just good old-fashioned, good people oversight, whether it's our people and our branches are on the contact center to deploy technology as much as we can to look for unusual patterns. So those algorithms are really more -- are really designed to look for things that are unusual in your account activity. So we weren't really referring to any algorithms that might -- and I understand the nature of your question, that could be biased in the sense of approving credits, for example. That's a separate area. And we obviously do use technology for credit approvals, et cetera. And again, Kevin, I'm sorry to shake you up. You might want to talk about that in terms of bias. But Rob, just while Kevin is getting ready on that question about credit, but Kath's comments are really more about how do we help customers. You'll be aware of the sort of Falcon program that we've had for many, many years, in fact, decades overseeing credit card transactions to identify potential fraud. It's really just an extension of that, and it will be an ongoing piece of work. But do you want to talk about from a credit perspective how we...

Just if I can add to what you also said, Shayne. I think when we talk about algorithms, what we're specifically looking at is individuals who we can see from previous history what's happened at certain times of a month when payments are due. It's that type of stuff that we sort of look like to add from that side. From a credit perspective, we're acutely conscious of the fact that we need to be aware of the impact of some of the biases that can be built in. What I would say is that no decision in its own right is just made by a machine. There's obviously the opportunity for customers to either appeal a decision or alternatively decisions which are going to be in negative, automatically get flicked to a human being to also reassess as well. So I wouldn't sort of say there can be bias, but there's the opportunity for human intervention would be the point I'd make on the credit side.

Thank you. Next question.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Carlos Castilla with Mello.

A few questions from me. I might just fire them all at you and then allow you to respond to it. The first one, nature. Good to hear that you've extended sort of those discussions with the largest emitting customers to consider the nature impacts they're having. But I mean, just to understand more broadly across the business how you're incorporating nature-related risks into lending decisions for those that are exposed to the adverse sort of consequences of biodiversity loss, et cetera? .

Yes.

The second question just around the requirement for nonfinancial KPIs to be incorporated into LTI as part of the APRA remuneration reforms. And just whether you've come to a landing yet on what those nonfinancial KPIs might be? And then, thirdly, we've had the voice legislation pass parliament today for the referendum to go ahead. Just interested to understand what you're planning to do in the lead up to the referendum in terms of your workforce and the broader community?

Yes. I will -- if you don't mind, we'll answer them in reverse order. I'll take the #2 and #3. So in terms of the voice. So ANZ is a supporter of the voice. And we have -- and how has that manifested itself? That has manifested itself in terms of financial support. So we have provided some financial support to the YES campaign. We will be internally with our staff, we see this as an obligation around education. So in fact, I think our first educational piece [ literature ] saw it over the weekend. So we'll start a series of interactions with our staff to educate them about the constitution and its history, what are the proponents in terms of the voice asking for and why. So that will be essentially the extent of it. We will not be engaging directly with our customers on the voice. So it's really just restricted to an educational campaign in respecting people's freedom of choice, and people will come to their own opinions to make sure that they do so on an educated basis internally and there will be a range of activities we do. Our support for the campaign has been relatively sort of below the line or relatively quiet. And that's -- given the discussions we've had with the YES campaign, we thought that was the most appropriate way for us to do that. And then finally, as part of it has also been educating ourselves in terms of the voice and that means interaction with leaders from the restatement of the heart, interacting with people at our Board and executives so that we ourselves were better educated about it. So that was the position on -- that may change over time. We're really very much working, hopefully, hand-in-hand with the -- from the Heart Campaign to make sure that our involvement is helpful. And that's the approach we'll continue to take as it evolves. In terms of the nonfinancial KPIs for APRA, we haven't determined that at this point. It's a great question. And it's always -- it's a classic dilemma where many of our shareholders would prefer. We didn't have nonfinancial KPIs at all, but we accept that that's now part of the requirement with our principle. So we're working that through with the Board. It's fair to say -- your question was around LTI. It's fair to say that in our balance scorecard, more broadly, we've always had nonfinancial KPIs or certainly, a range of metrics that we think are important in terms of driving fair and balanced outcomes for all stakeholders. Those include areas like gender diversity or employee satisfaction or NPS scores or some of the other factors that we've always taken into account what we're working. So it's not really a huge stretch for us. It's really just your question is it's really applied in terms of this new center with respect to the LTI. And so that is still up for the Board to decide later in this year, but we will. And then, Mark, did you want to talk about the nature space?

I'll start with that, and I think Kevin will probably add to that as well. I think it's fair to say, Carlos, that we're at what I'd call an exploratory stage on biodiversity. One of the things that we're learning with regards to this, while there is certainly a number of our customers looking at this issue, the amount of data, clear data around this and also the need for clarity, I think, with regards to the disclosure that will be required in this space is still pretty much under development. And we recently visited the U.K. and Europe again to just get some more information around how other banks and regulators are looking at this particular issue. And you want to add some stuff on that, Kevin, because you were gone on the tour.

Yes. So I think just to what Mark was saying, I think it was evident from Europe and the U.K. that probably, our customers are less progressed in terms of setting targets and disclosures. And I think for a lot of banks, they're sort of still finding their feet. What I'd also add in terms of our own credit assessment in line with our own social and environmental risk policy, we do expect our business customers to use international best practice to manage any potential biodiversity impacts and our own land acquisition statement also acknowledges that we will not knowingly support any transaction or alternatively any customer who's involved could impact on a culturally or environmentally sensitive area. So think of areas such as world heritage areas are Ramsar list, wetlands and other nature conservation parks, et cetera. So they're already built into our own credit policy at this stage.

Thanks, Carlos.

Your next question comes from [ Guy Schumann ] with [indiscernible].

Just 1 question for me today. So it's related to traditional landowners and obtaining free, prior and informed consents, noting that there are some examples of companies who have had delayed projects as expected has not been obtained. So I'm wondering how aimed at assessing lending to projects that have cultural heritage indigenous community impacts and whether free, prior, informed consent is a requirement.

It's a great question. I'm looking at Kevin and Mark to give a more informed answer. Kevin wants to...

Sorry, Shayne. I think the short answer to the question is that, that is factored into the decision-making process. So it is something that we do consider at that point in time, yes.

Okay. Thanks, Guy. Next question? Thanks, Kevin.

Your next question comes from Richard Wiles with Morgan Stanley.

Shayne, just referring to Slide 16 on your finance, emission targets. You say that they'll -- you remain on track by the end of 2024 to set interim targets for 9 priority sectors. It looks like you've got 8 there at the moment. So what's the 9th one, please?

Yes, we've got power gen, large-scale commercial real estate, oil and gas, as you're saying there, which is 6, then thermal coal and then transport. The others, obviously, that we'll be looking at will be -- which you're saying offshore as well will be eventually resi and agri. Those 2 I would -- then I think the discrepancy between 8 and say 10, which I'll just referenced there, Richard, is coal to be frank, which we've already made significant inroads on as you're aware. With the 2 that I just mentioned though, there is significant data issues associated with that. So we'll be hastening slowly with regards to the disclosures or our approach on that while we can gather up more information.

Okay. And then [Audio Gap] your -- I think I'm correct in saying your exposure to oil and gas and power is a little bit higher than some of your major bank peers. You've got targets in place for each of those. I think for oil and gas, it's the 26% reduction versus the FY '20 baseline. And for power, I think it's a 50% reduction versus the FY '20 baseline. How are you going on those 2 sectors towards the targets?

Yes. I think last year -- yes. Thanks, Richard. Our glide path on those are back into where we expected to be. You'll note last year, we saw a blip and increase, particularly in the energy side, the power generation side, simply because with the volatility that you saw in the market and very high energy prices, we saw some customers that we needed to support in the short term, and we did that on the basis that it was on the short term. Those facilities have now been repaid, and we're now back on that glide path to the 2030 targets that we've talked about.

I think it's worth pointing out that, that -- there was a financial exposure increase, but that financial exposure did not lead to greater emissions for most customers. It was a price of production had gone up. And so the mathematical outcome of that was a higher exposure, but it wasn't that we were contributing to an increase in emissions.

Increased emissions.

Yes.

Your next question comes from Jane Wu with Future Fund.

I'm going to take you to a topic that has been covered so far, modern slavery. So I wanted to just go to one of the things that you mentioned in your report about working with law enforcement agencies and particularly with the financial crime team's investigation into banking activities. So there's the case where you identify the possible case of modern slavery. And then you then referred this through to the enforcement agency. Can you explain at what point does ANZ actually bring that to an agency's attention? And then the case where you did do this, did you get any feedback from the authority or agency?

Yes, I can do that. And Kevin can add. It's a great question, Jane. So sadly, we do have situations where through our normal monitoring of transactions something might flag as suspicious. And so as you know, we have a bunch of obligations with AUSTRAC when things are related to money laundering, but we also have an obligation to anything that is just a suspicious matter and that's a reasonably wide definition. And so as soon as we are aware of something that we -- that is defined as suspicious, we report it essentially immediately. And then -- and it's then for those authorities to then handle it from there. And then that may require, for example, sometimes they would require us to close the account immediately. Sometimes, they might ask us to continue operating the account while they conduct their investigation. So we don't typically get -- we were chatting about this before. We don't typically get specific feedback on a case-by-case basis. As you can imagine, there's confidentiality issues, et cetera, and it's really for the authorities to deal with. But more broadly, we get feedback about the fact that our effective monitoring of such situations is helpful and a very important part of the overall process. Kevin, did you want to add to?

The only thing, Shayne, that I'd add to what you said is that, that information that we would have passed on to AUSTRAC, they would have then passed on to whatever the appropriate agency was, in turn, AUSTRAC through regular dialogue that it has with other financial institutions. It will share some of those insights with the other financial institutions so that they can, in turn, fine-tune the filters that they've got. And similarly, if another institution pick something up that for whatever reason, our filters had and that gets shared with us as well. So that's probably the only other thing, Shayne, that I've mentioned.

Thanks, Jane.

Okay. Can I just ask a quick follow-up?

Yes.

In terms of this aspect of monitoring, which obviously has been effective because you've actually been able to identify a suspicion, which has then been [ shared ] on. What has the bank actually done in terms of that aspect of this business to, I guess, to learn and address and improve its process?

Great question. Kevin?

Yes. Look, for a number of years, we've built that into our algorithms and our filters. So well before modern slavery legislation even came in, what we have done, however, over the last couple of years is to continue to fine-tune it, enhance it. And particularly as we learn and as law enforcement and AUSTRAC and other agencies learn and they pass that learning on to us as well. So we obviously did a review when modern slavery legislation came out. But we use the information we get from the other agencies to enhance what we do, so.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Elliott for closing remarks.

Okay. Look, thank you very much for your time today. Hopefully, you will understand this is an important area for us. And since 2018, we felt it was appropriate that we spent appropriate and sufficient time dealing with issues of ESG. While we do so on a separate day, in a separate way, I don't want it to be lost on people. We do see this as an integrated part of the way that we run the bank. And it's just core to who and what we are in terms of our purpose. It doesn't mean we get everything right. It's a constant area of learning. And I think if I made a couple of areas of important learning at the moment for us all, particularly around nature and biodiversity, and that's a very steep learning path that we're all on as a bank, and I think we're progressing pretty well on that. We'll have more to share undoubtedly next time we get together. And the other one is around scams. And while it's very easy to look at scams just as a purely financial outcome, it's more than that. And so really, the sophistication of the criminal activity on that means that we need to be as an industry, but also as ANZ, investing very, very heavily and really trying to innovate new ways to protect our customers but as we know, the best thing for customers to do is always be extremely vigilant. And it's our responsibility to continue not only education, but to protect them as best we can. But they are the 2 major areas. And then I mentioned the sort of more existential risk around housing and affordability, which we again, given it's so core to who and what we are as a bank here in Australia and New Zealand, it will continue to be an area of focus for us. And as I mentioned in my speech, somewhere, we would hope to contribute to the national dialogue about long-term solutions and not for a minute suggesting that any of those solutions will be easy. But thank you very much for your time today, and we enjoyed your questions. Thank you.