A Wunch of Bankers

For Daniel Ziffer and his Australia-wide audience, it was a complicated, galling, and gasp-inducing year at the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.

It wasn’t just its exhaustive rounds of hearings around the country — Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, and Sydney — on topics from farming finance to financial planning. It wasn’t even the long list of scandals exposed to a horrified nation — charging fees to dead people, blatant conflicts of interest, and taking $1 billion from customers in fees that banks were never entitled to.

What made it so fascinating, so heart-breaking, and so enraging was the procession of faces through the witness box, and the team of counsel gazing into the dark heart of banking.

Tearful victims, blank-faced executives, hapless regulators, and a couple of utter charlatans all had their day in court, watched by an audience of millions, and revealing — in their stories — the material to justify re-shaping the multi-trillion dollar financial services industry that forms a pillar of Australian life.

A Wunch of Bankers covers not just the big shocks, but the small moments — lost in the flurry of daily reporting — that reveal how companies have used the law, limp enforcement, and basic human behaviour to take advantage of customers.

Is there a phrase that judges how much life-insurance spruikers in call centres can terrify you about your impending death — and the grief-stricken ruins of an estate you’ll leave for your bereaved family — while still being legal?

Yes, there is.

Was there a meeting in which a bank’s executives ignored a warning of “Extreme” from its chief risk officer, to embark on an illegal scheme that accrued $3.6 billion in funds?

There was.

Mixed among the testimony are snippets from life on the road as the World’s Oldest Debuting TV Reporter — not just driving five hours one-way to talk to a man who almost blew his brains out over a bank nabbing his $22 million estate, but explaining how journalism can only ever give you a glimpse inside complex issues.

In A Wunch of Bankers, Daniel Ziffer bring out the colour and grit of the royal commission’s proceedings, and explores broader issues raised by the testimony. A mixture of analysis, reportage, and observations, it is densely researched and compellingly written.