ASIC warning: your offset account might not be offsetting at all

Offset accounts are supposed to be one of the simplest products in banking. Put money in, link it to your home loan and pay less interest. ASIC’s latest investigation suggests you might need to open your statements and check if your offset account is in fact working like that. 

This week on the podcast I sat down with the new ASIC Chair Sarah Court to unpack one of the most significant banking reports released this year. This week, ASIC have announced that they have dived deep into how offset accounts are working, and have concern that many are not working as they are supposed to. ASIC’s investigation found banks have already paid more than $55 million in compensation over two years after offset accounts failed to reduce customers’ home loan interest as promised. Even more concerning, the regulator says the true scale of the problem may be much larger because some banks couldn’t reliably identify customers who had requested an offset account in the first place.

We talk through how offset accounts are supposed to work, why so many failures have occurred, why they’re often difficult for customers to detect, and the simple checks every mortgage holder should make  - particularly if you’ve refinanced, switched loan products or come off a fixed-rate loan in recent years (and even if you haven’t).

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