Thank you for joining us at our ESG Investor Forum. 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 peoples joining us today. 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. With me today is our Group Executive, Institutional, Mark Whelan, Head of Financial Wellbeing, Mohammed. Sustainability, financial wellbeing, and customer fairness. 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 wellbeing 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. We weave purpose and strategy together to create value for all stakeholders, as shown on our value creation model. This is supported by a range of metrics reviewed regularly by the board and management. Livable and sustainable housing. 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. Before handing over to my colleagues, I wanted to touch on one of our most material ESG issues, affordable housing. 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. There was hope that higher interest rates would lead to a moderation in house prices. 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. ANZ is playing a role by increasing our lending to affordable housing on both sides of the Tasman 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 NZD 200 million in new lending since we launched in 2022. 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. 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 an AUD 540 million financing for Lightsource bp to support the development of solar farms in New South Wales and Victoria. 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 AUD 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 AUD 166 billion since October 2015. Let me now turn to our decarbonization pathways and targets. We have six sectoral 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 three transport subsectors: auto manufacturing, airlines, and shipping. 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.
One of these approvals was for recently 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. Over time, we will expand this to cover more institutional customers in high-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.
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 three 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 two 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. This is not unexpected. However, it is likely that the adoption of the Taskforce on 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 Airports'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 here 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. 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 Wellbeing 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 Wellbeing and behavioral science we have embedded into our innovation processes. Our continued research on Financial Wellbeing, with deep dive reports on the Financial Wellbeing of women in Australia, people with disability or long-term health conditions, and the digital capability of older Australians.
The ANZ Roy Morgan Financial Wellbeing Indicator that provides a regular pulse check on the financial wellbeing 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 with over 300,000 customers, nearly 30% of whom have a savings goal in place. Engagement with our Financial Wellbeing 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 wellbeing 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, help to improve the financial inclusion and capability of lower-income individuals.
Most recently, we refreshed Money Business and included additional content in MoneyMinded 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 the United Nations Commitment to Financial Health and Inclusion, which will provide additional transparency in our impact on customer and community financial wellbeing. Financial wellbeing 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 of 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. 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 commitment 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. 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. When we do, we seek to resolve complaints with empathy and fairness. Over the last two 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.
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 time frames for most scam cases reduced by over 50%. As Shane and Mo have already mentioned, we anticipate further challenges for some of our customers, given the current and forecast economic climate.
We're particularly alive to ensuring respectful, fair, and appropriate outcomes for our customers. I'll now hand back to Shane for Q&A.
Thanks, Kath, operator will open up for questions.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Rob Koh with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the presentation today. Maybe can I try two questions, just one 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'll put Kevin on notice if he wants to add to my answer, our chief risk officer. Actually, it's interesting, Rob, in that there don't appear to be any particular indicators, so there's certainly no geographic overlay like we've seen in the past. You know, you'd be aware that, you know, 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, you know, 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.
You know, there's some reasonable hypothesis of why that might be the case in terms of their ability to prepare well in advance for that. That's hasn't typically been an indicator. It's really a relatively. 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. Then, of course, the real indicator is those that have less secure employment. At the end of the day, what we've found is those that do have a home owner, 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's sort of reinforced even when we look at things like our hardship cases. Kevin, did you have any? Sorry, Kevin's just being micd up, so did you want to add any?
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. 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. Thank you.
On to your second question, Rob?
Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Corbally. Thanks, Mr. Elliott. Okay, 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.
Yeah, that's a very good question. I think the point there was, you know, at some level, we're at war here with this. This was relating to Kath's concern, in particular, around scams, right? As we know, sadly, there's a significant industry of scammers out there, and they're continually evolving the way that they are tricking and defrauding customers. What we try to do, in addition to just, you know, good old-fashioned, good people oversight, whether it's our people in our branches or on the contact center, to deploy technology as much as we can to look for unusual patterns. Those algorithms are really more, are really designed to look for things that are unusual in your account activity. We weren't really referring to any algorithms that might,
I understand the nature of your question, that could be biased in the sense of, you know, approving credits, for example. That's a separate area, and we obviously do use technology for credit approvals, et cetera. Again, Kevin, I'm sorry to drag you up. You might want to talk about that in terms of bias. Rob, just while Kevin's getting ready on that question about credit approval, Kath's comments are really more about how do we help customers. You know, 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'll be an ongoing piece of work. Do you want to talk about it from a credit perspective, how we...
Yeah. 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 the month when payments are due. It's that type of stuff that we sort of look like 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 the negative, automatically get flicked to a human being to also reassess as well.
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.
Many thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Carlos Costello with Merrill. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, team. A few questions from me. I might just fire them all at you
Okay
and allow you to respond, as you see fit. 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'm interested 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 non-financial KPIs to be incorporated into LTI as part of the APRA remuneration reforms, just whether you've come to a landing yet on what those non-financial KPIs might be?
Yep.
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.
Yeah, if you don't mind, we'll answer them in reverse order. I'll take the number two and three. In terms of the Voice, ANZ is a supporter of the Voice. 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. In fact, I think our first educational piece, literally I saw it over the weekend. 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. That'll be essentially the extent of it.
We will not be engaging directly with our customers on the Voice. It's really just restricted to an educational campaign and 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. There'll be a range of activities we do. Our support for the campaign has been relatively sort of below the line or relatively quiet, that's given the discussions we'd had with the Yes campaign, we thought that was the most appropriate way for us to do that.
Finally, as part of it, was also been educating ourselves in terms of the Voice, and that means interacting with leaders from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, interacting with people at our board and executives, so that we ourselves were better educated about it. That was the position on the Voice. Look, 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 non-financial KPIs for APRA, we haven't determined that at this point. It's a great question. And it's a classic dilemma where many of our shareholders would prefer we didn't have
non-financial KPIs at all. We accept that that's now part of the requirement with our print, 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 balanced scorecard, more broadly, we've always had non-financial 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. 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 standard with respect to LTI. That is still up for the board to decide later in this year, we will. Mark, did you want to talk about the nature?
Yep.
Piece?
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 disclosures that will be required, in this space, is still pretty much under development.
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. Do you want to add some stuff on that, Kevin, because you were on the tour? Yeah.
I think just to what Mark is 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. 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, to 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. Our own Land Acquisition Statement also acknowledges that we will not knowingly support any transaction or alternatively, any customer who's involved or could impact on a culturally or environmentally sensitive area. Think of areas such as world heritage areas or Ramsar List wetlands and other nature conservation parks, et cetera.
They're already built into our own credit policy at this stage.
Yeah. Thanks, Carlos.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Guy Shearman with Aware Super. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, all, thank you for the brilliant presentation. Just the one question for me today. It's related to traditional landowners and obtaining Free, Prior and Informed Consent. Noting that there are some examples of companies who have had delayed projects as FPIC had not been obtained. I'm wondering how ANZ is 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, He's right.
Sorry, Shane.
Running up.
Okay. I think the short answer to the question is that that is factored into the decision-making process. It is something that we do consider at that point in time. Yes.
Okay. Thanks, Guy. Next question. Thanks, Kevin. Model stated.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Richard Wiles with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Hi, Richard.
Hey, Shayne. Good afternoon. Just referring to slide 16 on your finance division targets. You say there that you remain on track by the end of 2024 to set interim targets for nine priority sectors. Looks like you've got eight there at the moment. What's the ninth one, please?
Three, four, five, six, seven . Yeah, look, we've got power gen, large scale commercial real estate, oil and gas, as you're saying there, which is six, then thermal coal and then transport. The others, obviously, that we'll be looking at will be, which you're seeing offshore as well, will be eventually resi and agri. Those two. Then, I think the discrepancy between eight and, say, 10, which I've just referenced there, Richard, is coal, to be frank, which we've already made significant inroads on, as you're aware. With the two that I just mentioned, though, there's 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. Thanks, Mark.
Sorry.
Saying that 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.
Yeah.
You've got targets in place for each of those. I think for oil and gas, it's a 26% reduction versus the FY20 baseline, and for power, I think it's a 50% reduction versus the FY 2020 baseline. How are you going on those two sectors?
Yeah, I think, last year.
What are the targets?
Thanks, Richard. Our glide path on those are back into where we expect it to be. You'll note last year we saw a blip, an 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, 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.
There was a financial exposure increase, but that financial exposure did not lead to greater emissions from those customers. It was the 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.
Increase in emissions.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure. Okay. Thank you.
Thanks, Richard.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Jane Wu with Future Fund. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'm going to take you to a topic that has been covered so far, modern slavery. 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. There's the case where you identified a 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? In the case where you did do this, did you get any feedback from the authorital agency?
Yeah, I can do that, and Kevin can give some data. It's a great question, Jane.
Thank you.
Sadly, we do have situations where, through our normal monitoring of transactions, something might flag as suspicious. As you know, we have a bunch of obligations with AUSTRAC when things are related to money laundering, but we also have an obligation, anything that is just a suspicious matter, and that's a reasonably wide definition. As soon as we are aware of something that is defined as suspicious, we report it essentially immediately. It is then for those authorities to then handle it from there. 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. 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, it's really for the authorities to deal with. 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?
The only thing, Shayne, that I'd add to what you said, is 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. Similarly, if another institution picks something up that for whatever reason, our filters hadn't, that gets shared with us as well. That's probably the only other thing, Shayne, that I'd mention.
Thanks, Jane.
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 referred 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?
Yeah. Look, for a number of years, we've built that into our algorithms and our filters, 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. We obviously did a review when modern slavery legislation came out, but we've used the information we get from the other agencies to enhance what we do, so.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jane.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Elliott for closing remarks.
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, 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, you know, very steep learning path that we're all on as a bank, I think we're progressing pretty well on that. We'll have more to share undoubtedly, next time we get together. The other one is around scams. While it's very easy to look at scams just as a purely financial outcome, it's more than that. 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.
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. They are the two major areas. 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, will continue to be an area of focus for us. As I mentioned in my speech somewhere, we 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. Thank you very much for your time today, and we enjoyed your questions. Thank you.