Coffey TamatiTAMATI COFFEY (Labour—Waiariki): Thank you Madam Chair. I was fortunate enough to be able to sit on the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee and listen to a lot of the submissions that came through from all areas of financial service providers. We had everybody from the Citizens Advice Bureau coming to present through to the Financial Services Council of New Zealand. Everybody brought with them their own concerns and I'm glad that we've gotten to the stage where the kinks are slowly starting to be ironed out but I just wanted to drill down into something that kept coming up time and time again. That was the little section which talked about the duty on behalf of the financial service provider to give priority to the clients' interests. Now this sounds really really standard right? You'd think that everybody that offered a product as a financial service provider would actually do so ethically and with the clients' interests first but unfortunately what was revealed was that actually quite a few financial service providers were marketing their own products they were in it for themselves and they weren't at all putting the clients' interests first. A lot of our submissions centred around that and argued back and forth about whether or not we should be looking after the clients' interests first or whether or not an employee of say a bank has got a duty to the bank first and foremost to put the bank's interests first. That then gives rise to questions around commissions and whether or not commissions are something that are ethical in that kind of forum. Bob goes into the bank; he is applying for a loan. The question is: is Rob who's sitting there and getting paid a commission to push the bank's products acting in the best interests of the client? And actually I would argue that no he's not; he's arguing in the best interests of the bank. So clause 27 inserts new section 431J into the Financial Markets Conduct Act and that would impose a duty on financial advice providers to take all reasonable steps to put the client's interests first. It is ideal but it is fraught with difficulty as well. Of course there was the concern that was raised that Mary who works at the bank would then have to list every single product from every other bank available to try and understand exactly where the best product was for the customer sitting in front of them. It was kind of argued that maybe there needs to be carve-outs in that process. Maybe we need to take into consideration the fact that the financial service providers don't actually know what every product on the market is and whether or not that holds up that ideal of putting the client's interests first. So I guess that I'm keen to hear from the Minister just how that process evolved. Once we'd heard the submissions it was quite clear that there was a desire to put the client's interests first but actually drilling down into where we got to with that would be incredibly helpful. I guess the fact of the matter is that the financial service provider wouldn't know all of the products out there on the market. They'd actually know the products that they're selling or that they're getting commission for as well. One of the submissions by the Citizens Advice Bureau was strictly around that—around whether or not we should be disincentivising that whole commission situation whereby if you are giving financial advice maybe you shouldn't be getting a commission. I know that there were a lot of submissions that centred around that whole debate around commissions. So I would really like to know where the Minister got to with that because on behalf of all of the submissions that we heard we should probably get an answer to that. As I say it's quite ideal putting the client's interests first but hopefully this bill gets to reflect some of those submissions that were presented to the select committee when the time came. So if we could hear from that that would be incredibly helpful. Thank you Madam Chair.