Are you unable to meet your loan repayments under a credit facility, such as a credit card, personal loan or home loan?
If you are in financial difficulty, you are entitled to the following help.
Customer owned banks have dedicated staff trained to help you overcome financial difficulty. Ask them for help and they may offer to:
While your financial difficulty request is being considered, your customer owned bank cannot make a default listing on your credit file or sell your debt to another company.
Unless agreed otherwise, they can still charge interest on your account. This means your debt will continue to increase, so it’s important you make whatever payments you can during the application process.
It is also important to stay in touch with your customer owned bank to get an update of your status of your application.
Your customer owned bank must provide you with access to information about financial difficulty over the phone, at a branch or online. This may include:
If your customer owned bank is unable to help you when you are in financial difficulty, you may wish to lodge a dispute.
Two schemes provide independent dispute resolution services, which are free to consumers. Your customer owned bank will tell you which scheme it subscribes to, or contact the scheme directly to find out if it is a subscriber:
Australian Financial Complaints Authority
Call: 1800 931 678
Email: [email protected]
If you believe your customer owned bank has breached its financial difficulty obligations under the Code, you can report a concern. You can help to maintain high service standards by reporting your concerns.
Download the Customer Owned Banking Code of Practice (PDF, 781 KB, 32 pages).
Financial Difficulty Guidance for consumers (PDF, 242 KB, two pages).