Macquarie Private Wealth was on the receiving end of more hostile media coverage in recent days when a report said the bank sent letters to dead people as part of its mailout to 160,000 current and former clients who may have received poor financial advice.

Macquarie Private Wealth, part of Australia’s Macquarie, has been on the receiving end of more hostile media coverage. The Sydney Morning Herald’s BusinessDay report has said the bank sent letters to dead people as part of its mailout to 160,000 current and former clients who may have received poor financial advice.

The news report said that although deceased persons are receiving correspondence as part of the remediation effort, some living clients who are in dispute with Macquarie have yet to receive the letter that is required to be mailed out as part of a deal with the corporate regulator.

The SMH said a BusinessDay investigation has “exposed allegations of serious problems at Macquarie Private Wealth, including an allegation that some advisors circulated a cheat sheet dubbed the `Penske file’”.

The report said the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the regulator, is looking to investigate individual cases where Macquarie has spent months dealing with a complaint, but failed to finalise a response.

Responding to the article by the SMH, the bank said in a statement today: “Macquarie notes that on 15 August 2014, ASIC Commissioner, Peter Kell, told a press conference that: `the undertaking is a very comprehensive undertaking in this case covering all aspects of MEL's operations, compliance framework, training, the remediation program itself, so there is a very considerable amount of work to be done. We are satisfied with the progress of the work...’.”

The bank said it has invested around A$49 million in new processes, practices and systems over two years, including new technology to support and train advisors.

“The client remediation process also announced at the AGM included the Group taking the initiative to write to more than 160,000 clients, and is subject to oversight by Deloitte and ASIC. The mail out of those letters is staggered and largely complete. A final small number is in the process of being sent. Given the breadth of this communication and that it involves past clients from up to 10 years ago, there may unfortunately be isolated instances where some letters have been misaddressed. Clients can contact MPW at any time to raise concerns about receipt of letters,” the statement said, referring to the issue of deceased persons.

“Macquarie is processing all complaints as expeditiously as possible and totally rejects any suggestion of intentionally delaying the resolution of any matters,” it said, adding that it has recently lodged a complaint with the Press Council regarding previous reporting on Macquarie Private Wealth by the SMH in August (see here). In that case, Macquarie said it filed a complaint with the country’s media watchdog over “inaccurate, unattributed and unsubstantiated claims” by the SMH that some of its wealth manager advisors cheated on competency exams and put clients into high-risk products.

The bank has issued a sharply-worded response to an article by the SMH that was published on 2 August. A day later, the bank said: “Although Macquarie received a list of 45 questions from the SMH (the response to which was sent to the relevant reporter and published on our website here) the SMH omitted from the list its two central claims against MPW.  These were that that MPW misclassified a former client as sophisticated or wholesale who consequently suffered losses; and that MPW management circulated answers to competency tests.”