This means, putting our customers first, being friendly and easy to do business with and providing value for money.

Here are some of the ways we are achieving this:

• Our Customer Charter includes our 10 promises on basic customer service standards. We monitor our progress on queue times, service levels and commitments, customer communication, complaint management, privacy and more. We publicly report our performance against each of these promises every year.
• Our Customer Advocate investigates and resolves difficult complaints. He aims to resolve outstanding issues as quickly and fairly as possible and ensure remedial action is taken to address the systemic issues that can give rise to customer complaints. In 2004, as a result of reviews conducted by the Customer Advocate, we paid approximately $54,000 in compensation to customers. ANZ’s Customer Advocate publicly reports performance and progress each year.
• We provide simple, market-leading basic banking products, such as our low-fee banking package for personal banking customers.
• Our partnership with leading Australian businessman Richard Pratt’s Visy Group, which is allocating $100 million to assist irrigators convert to water-saving systems, will enable customers to obtain funding from ANZ without necessarily having to provide security against their property.