Macquarie and ASIC have jointly proposed a $14 million civil penalty to the court over misleading descriptions of a savings account promotion, the regulator said in a statement. The bank does not intend to contest the proceeding and has already paid $8.8 million in remediation to almost 40,000 customers.
The conduct involved Macquarie advertising a Welcome Rate on its Macquarie Savings Account as a "welcome variable rate" or "bonus" between 1 December 2021 and 9 September 2022. The Welcome Rate generally functioned as a fixed rate applied instead of, not on top of, the standard variable rate across a four-month promotional period. When rates were rising through 2022, the gap separating the Welcome Rate from the standard variable rate shrank and in some cases vanished altogether.
Macquarie acknowledged it had not taken necessary steps to keep its Welcome Rate statements clear and free of potential customer confusion. The specific Corporations Act provisions Macquarie admitted contravening are sections 912A(1)(a) and 912A(5A).
Ben Perham, who heads banking and financial services at the bank, said Macquarie ought to have done a better job of explaining on its website how the Welcome Rate would apply, and offered an apology for any confusion. Perham said the bank received customer complaints about the Welcome Rate description and chose to pay $8.8 million in compensation to restore customers to the position they would have been in had the Welcome Rate operated as a fixed bonus interest margin.
Macquarie recorded the matter in its books and fully accounted for it in the financial year ending 31 March 2026. The proposed $14 million penalty remains subject to court approval.
ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland said getting the basics right, including systems and processes that honour commitments to customers, is a minimum expectation of banks, and that customers should not need to scrutinise individual transactions to confirm they received the correct interest. Kirkland said the issue went beyond ambiguous wording: Macquarie's controls and systems were insufficient to flag the risk that customers would misread how the Welcome Rate functioned.
ASIC said this enforcement action sits within its 2026 priority targeting pricing practices that affect Australians' cost of living, as well as an ongoing priority addressing systemic compliance failures at large financial institutions that cause consumer harm. ASIC acknowledged that Macquarie engaged constructively during its investigation and that its actions were not deliberate.
Perham said Macquarie had carried out a thorough review of all product descriptions across its website for its Transaction and Savings Account products and prioritised improving governance, systems, controls and procedures for creating, approving and publishing customer-facing material. An April 2025 Australian Financial Complaints Authority determination preceded ASIC's court action.
Kirkland noted that a bank's highest advertised rate might apply only for a set period or only when the customer satisfies specified conditions. ASIC noted that Australians hold almost $1.8 trillion in household deposits.
Customers who held a Macquarie Savings Account during the promotional period and were affected have already received a share of the $8.8 million remediation Macquarie paid. ASIC is urging all bank customers to check the conditions attached to their savings accounts, confirm they are meeting those conditions, and raise with their bank any situation where they qualify for a higher rate but are not receiving it.
Official statements: Macquarie, ASIC
Reporting: ABC News, The Guardian, Yahoo Finance, The Nightly
Written by Pick & Scroll News from the reporting and documents linked above.
