Anyone who has listened to this programme this year will know they I have been calling for an inquiry into our banking and insurance industry

There have been a number of shows where we have looked at what consumers have been presented with, what they been denied, what they felt like they have been pressured into. 

We have seen the banks maintain particularly healthy profits. We have heard how they have linked their instruments meaning that for most customers to get one service you need to get another offered through the same organisation. We have heard accusations of double dipping.

We have also heard allegations of bank and insurance offers being under pressure to upsell, even if it’s not in the customer's interest.

And on top of it all was the shock I heard from callers when I told them that the bulk of the industry is self-regulating. The Insurance Ombudsman is funded by the industry and so the insinuation is always that the poacher is also the gamekeeper

The backdrop to these stories has been the Royal Commission of inquiry into the bank and insurance companies in Australia. Many of the companies investigated there own the companies here and again the insinuation is what would the banks here perform any differently to their parent companies across the ditch.

So now Consumer NZ has joined the call for greater monitoring of banks and insurance companies, claiming Kiwis are being sold products they do not need by companies that are facing a Royal Commission in Australia.

Yesterday Consumer NZ chief executive Sue Chetwin told the finance and expenditure select committee looking into the need for an inquiry that while the New Zealand financial institutions continue to maintain the Aussie problems are not here that’s exactly what the Australian banks said before the inquiry which uncovered bribery and fraud.

Now I have never said that the banks are dodgy, but I have said where is the harm in having a look.

I have plenty of correspondence from people in the industry suggesting that the amount of self-regulation in the finance industry is a worry. Not just for consumers but also for the reputational risk to the industry.

When Chris Hipkins failed to turn up in the house yesterday with emails from the Prime Minister to Derek Handley that is actually a worse look than turning up with emails. We can now imagine that there are emails and we can also imagine them to be very bad.

If there’s smoke around everyone wants to find out if there’s a fire. At the moment there appears to be a lot of smoke around the country on a lot of fronts.