Latest news with #ScottRussell
1News
6 days ago
- Business
- 1News
Class action settlement against ASB, ANZ for over $300m rejected
Claimants in a class action law suit against the ANZ and ASB banks have offered to settle a four-year case for breaches of credit laws for more than $300 million. The offer has been disclosed at the finance and expenditure select committee hearing into proposed amendments to the credit contracts and consumer finance act (CCCFA), to close loopholes which might expose banks and other financial services companies to action for historic minor breaches of the laws. The law suit involved more than 150,000 customers of the two banks affected between 2015 and 2019 over breaches of the laws for not making proper disclosures resulting in overcharging of fees and interest. "We're making this offer to protect our clients and the country from the uncertainty National [government] will create if it pushes these amendments through," the lawyer leading the class action Scott Russell said. The consumer group claimed proposed changes to the act could retrospectively undermine their legal action. ADVERTISEMENT "If passed, the amendments would apply retrospectively specifically targeting the class action. They would allow the banks to argue for reduced refunds or to erase them altogether – effectively giving them a free pass for misconduct between 2015 and 2019." The class action was being jointly funded by Australia-based litigation funder CASL and New Zealand litigation funder LPF Group, which would take a percentage of any settlement or court award. Settlement rejected ANZ speedily rejected the settlement offer as a "stunt". "The proposed settlement appears to be primarily driven by the financial interests of the litigation funders and the proposed resolution does not reflect the nature or scale of the underlying issue," the bank said in a statement. "The litigation funders are worried because their claim is not just or equitable but instead involves them getting a potential windfall from unclear and bad law." The banking industry has also claimed that the loopholes if not fixed might result in a $13 billion threat to the financial system. ADVERTISEMENT One of the class action counsel Davey Salmon KC told the select committee the industry's claims were not real. "There is not a menace here." "Nor is there a major exposure for the banks, it is not said by the banks... that there is a high level of risk from this claim. The sum sought will not affect the viability or the balance sheets materially of either defendant bank. "The plaintiffs have in recent times sent an indicative proposal for a settlement in the order of $306 and $309 million." ANZ and ASB have already paid more than $43m to recompense affected customers in a settlement with the Commerce Commission back in 2020. By Gyles Beckford of
RNZ News
14-07-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Claims a banking class action is under threat from law change
Photo: There are concerns a class action lawsuit against two of our biggest banks will be undermined by a law change going through Parliament. The government introduced a bill to amend the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act at the end of March. Among the changes - the redress for customers if banks or creditors fail in their disclosures. Currently lenders have to refund all fees and interest charged if they were in breach of disclosure laws; what's proposed would see that left to the courts to decide what is 'just' and 'equitable' in any breach. The proposed change comes as over 150,000 customers of ANZ and ASB undertake a class action over breaches made by both banks between 2015 and 2019. But Scott Russell, the lawyer leading the class action , is concerned about the fairness of the law change, given it will apply retrospectively.
Forbes
18-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
From Chatbots To Workbots: Why NiCE's AI Strategy Focuses On Execution
NiCE is betting that AI agents that complete tasks—not just conversations—will separate winners from pretenders in the enterprise AI race The artificial intelligence hype cycle has reached peak saturation, with technology vendors scrambling to slap "AI-powered" labels on everything from refrigerator recipe suggestions to chatbots that rely on simple keyword matching. Yet, for all the breathless marketing rhetoric, most business leaders are still waiting for AI that simplifies operations and improves data analysis. NiCE, a customer experience platform provider, is making a calculated bet that the next phase of enterprise AI won't be about making chatbots sound more human. The next wave of business outcomes will leverage AI agents that can navigate complex business processes from start to finish with minimal human intervention. NiCE's CEO, Scott Russell said, 'Optimizing knowledge is not just critical for AI to truly thrive in your environment, but it's also the key for transforming service from reactive to proactive, identifying opportunities to solve issues and predict future needs.' NiCE's recent product launches and strategic moves reveal a move toward enhanced automation and agentic AI. The first wave of enterprise AI focused primarily on making data more accessible through conversational interfaces—essentially putting a chat layer on top of existing applications and knowledge repositories. While this represented significant progress in democratizing data access, it only scratched the surface of AI's potential business value. Organizations could ask questions and get answers, but the burden of reasoning through complex decisions and taking action remained entirely on human operators. Going forward, technology vendors, such as NiCE, will use AI to deliver solutions that can reason through multifaceted problems and take semi or fully autonomous action. This evolution from conversational AI to agentic AI represents the difference between AI that informs and AI that performs. Agentic AI enhances a company's ability to analyze context, weigh multiple variables, make informed decisions based on key business performance indicators, and execute actions across interconnected systems. Traditional conversational AI helps a customer service representative find relevant information. Still, agentic AI can help a representative evaluate a customer's complete history more easily, assess risk factors, determine appropriate responses based on business rules, and automatically trigger the necessary workflows to resolve issues end-to-end. "There's a big difference between AI that talks and AI that gets things done," explains Barry Cooper, President of NiCE's CX Division. "While others are building agents that mimic conversations, we're building agents that fulfill customer needs—end to end." This distinction becomes crucial when examining NiCE's CXone Mpower Agents. Traditional AI chatbots had limited access to data, offered scripted responses, and were confined to specific areas of the business, such as front-office or back-office operations. NiCE's AI agent platform aim to break through these constraints by operating across the entire enterprise ecosystem—from initial customer contact through mid-office approvals to back-end fulfillment systems. Admittedly, Agentic AI is the AI buzzword of 2025, but early, well-scoped use cases show promise. Technology companies are increasingly working to streamline AI deployment as traditional approaches require extensive technical resources, custom development, and lengthy implementation cycles. NiCE's model simplifies AI agent creation while maintaining enterprise-grade sophistication through what they call vibe coding, allowing business users to tailor each agent's personality and communication style without requiring technical expertise. While the concept of vibe coding remains ill-defined, and its merits are hotly debated within the enterprise software community, there is a broad consensus around the underlying goal of making AI agents easier to code and deploy. The specific term matters less than the fundamental shift toward empowering business users to create and customize AI functionality without requiring deep technical expertise. In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, no single vendor can deliver everything an enterprise needs to succeed with AI, cloud, data, and digital transformation. Today, companies are no longer looking for isolated solutions—they need interconnected ecosystems. That's why strategic partnerships are essential. By working together, enterprise technology vendors can bridge data and function silos, improving workflows and accelerating innovation. Just as importantly, these alliances help enterprises extract greater value from existing technology investments by ensuring that new capabilities work in concert with the tools already in place. Over the past several months, NiCE has expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and added ServiceNow and Snowflake to the mix. At Interactions 2025, NiCE announced an expanded collaboration with AWS, bringing together NiCE's domain expertise and rich interaction data with AWS's cloud infrastructure and generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and the Amazon Nova family of large language models. The partnership addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing enterprise AI deployments: fragmented workflows, disconnected data, and inconsistent global performance. The partnership focuses on three core pillars. First, content-aware automation ensures that AI-generated responses are highly relevant and context-specific. Using the Amazon Q Index, Mpower Agents are equipped with up-to-date business content—from product documentation to policy details and case histories—enabling them to respond accurately and confidently in real time. Second, the integration delivers enterprise-wide orchestration by bridging front, middle, and back-office operations. NiCE's CXone Mpower Orchestrator automates workflows across functional teams, while Amazon Q Business extends this reach into a broader set of enterprise applications—eliminating silos and streamlining complex processes. Additionally, global scalability is made possible through AWS's robust cloud infrastructure. With low-latency performance and high availability across regions, multinational organizations can deploy and scale AI-driven customer service experiences quickly and consistently around the world. NiCE's partnership strategy also extends beyond AWS to include other critical enterprise platforms, such as ServiceNow and Snowflake. NiCE's latest partnership with ServiceNow aims to eliminate long-standing service gaps by tightly integrating real-time customer engagement with enterprise workflow automation. Announced at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2025 event, the collaboration integrates NiCE's customer service platform with ServiceNow's AI and Customer Service Management (CSM) tools to streamline operations across the entire organization, from the front office to the back. The goal: fully automated customer service fulfillment. The combined solution routes inquiries based on sentiment, intent, and service-level agreements (SLAs)—bridging siloed departments to accelerate resolution times and enhance both customer and employee experiences. Role-based AI copilots assist agents and back-office teams with real-time insights and next-best actions, while continuous optimization tools flag issues and launch workflows automatically. These relationships provide access to complementary technologies and customer bases, allowing NiCE to integrate with the broader enterprise software ecosystem that companies rely on for operations, data management, and workflow automation. NiCE's strategic collaboration with Snowflake aims to unlock the full value of customer interaction data by making it accessible, secure, and actionable across the enterprise. By integrating Snowflake's AI Data Cloud with CXone Mpower, NICE can improve data sharing, breaking down silos that have traditionally limited the impact of customer insights. Snowflake serves as the backbone of the CXone Mpower data lake, centralizing interaction data and enriching it with information from other enterprise systems. This unified data foundation allows organizations to automate key processes—from billing to claims handling—while powering AI-driven analytics, dashboards, and decision-making. The result: faster fulfillment, greater accuracy, and a deeper, organization-wide understanding of the customer experience. Apparently, 2025 is the year of the brand refresh. The technology industry has witnessed updates from Five9, Google's G, Hitachi HPE, and Qualcomm's introduction of Dragonwing, alongside NiCE's own transformation. Every brand refresh has its own story to tell, but NiCE's new logo and marketing campaign represent more than a desire for fresh typography and color schemes. The rebrand indicates the company's strategic desire to expand its AI vision beyond the contact center to encompass its broader portfolio of finance and security solutions. The company describes the rebrand as positioning "NICE to empower brands to deliver AI-powered experiences that are proactive, human-centered and intuitive—whether connecting with customers, protecting communities or combatting financial crime." NiCE's solution involves partnering with actress Kristen Bell, who serves as the face of the company's "NiCE World" brand campaign. The initiative positions Bell as the "NiCEst Person in the World," NiCE said the campaign "builds on NiCE's reimagined brand, championing a future where AI isn't just intelligent – it's connected, intuitive and working behind the scenes to make life better. The enterprise AI market remains in flux, with new entrants and existing players continually repositioning themselves. NiCE's focus on domain expertise, integration depth, strategic partnerships, and automation suggests a company that understands both the technical and implementation requirements necessary for large-scale AI adoption. As enterprises increasingly demand AI that delivers results, NiCE's bet on fulfillment-focused automation may prove prescient. Of course, there's still the matter of cost and return on investment. Most companies struggle to understand and plan for the true product and operational costs of AI. Organizations need to work with their technology vendors to deploy well-scoped use case that deliver measurable return on investment, fast. The question isn't whether AI will transform customer experience—it's which companies will build AI that completes the transformation rather than just talking about it.
Scoop
17-06-2025
- Business
- Scoop
Please Explain! The Proponents Of The Retrospective Law Change Need To Front Up
Those responsible for pushing a retrospective law change that could wipe out the rights of tens of thousands of New Zealanders must now front up to provide a formal 'please- explain'. That's the call from Scott Russell, the lawyer leading the Banking Class Action against ANZ and ASB, who has formally written to Cameron Brewer, MP as Chair of Parliament's Finance and Expenditure Committee urging him to call key decision-makers and proponents of the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Amendment Bill to publicly explain the rationale for this extraordinary intervention. The Committee has the power to compel individuals to appear and a more clear-cut case for using that power would be hard to imagine. 'The Government is rewriting the law half-way through an active legal case to benefit two powerful Australian-owned banks – and no one seems to be taking responsibility for making the decision,' said Russell. 'Hon Scott Simpson, Commerce Minister says the banks didn't ask for it. The banks haven't commented. MBIE won't release the documents. And the public is being asked to accept it all on blind trust. Enough. It's time for answers.' Russell's submission urges the Select Committee to summon the following to 'Please Explain': The Chair and Chief Executives of ANZ and ASB to explain their role in the process; Senior MBIE officials to justify the sudden shift to retrospective legislation following private meetings with the banks; The Reserve Bank to provide any evidence backing claims that the law change is needed to protect financial stability. 'If their rationale is sound, let's hear it. Because right now, no one has offered a credible explanation for why a law change ruled out during the public consultation stage was suddenly resurrected behind closed doors – and timed perfectly to potentially limit the liability of two banks in a live court case.' The Government has refused to release unredacted versions of the Regulatory Impact Statement and delayed key OIA responses until after the public submission period closes on 23 June. The Ombudsman is now investigating. 'The Select Committee process cannot be allowed to rubber-stamp a law change that overrides consumer rights and undermines public trust – especially when those responsible won't even show up to explain it,' Russell said. 'If this is in the public interest, let the public hear why.'
1News
29-05-2025
- Business
- 1News
National accused of putting needs of banks before everyday Kiwis
The National Party is being accused of putting the needs of banks before everyday Kiwis after introducing legislation that could mean two big Australian-owned lenders avoid paying millions of dollars in refunds. One customer said the amendment to lending laws would allow the banks to get off "scot-free" while the minister in charge said it simply allowed the courts to have more discretion in settling disputes. The Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act (CCCFA) passed its first reading in Parliament last week and included a retrospective amendment relating to consequences for historical disclosure breaches by lenders. An investigation by the Commerce Commission had found two banks did not disclose the necessary information regarding customer loans. It meant the banks were potentially liable to refund millions of dollars in fees and interest. 'We should just be able to trust our bank' ADVERTISEMENT Lawyer Scott Russell, acting on behalf of those taking the class action, said the omission regarded "core business" for the banks. 'It's simple stuff. It's disclosure rules that allow ordinary New Zealanders to understand their financial position,' Russell said. Anthony Simons, a small business owner, was among the 170,000 customers who' took legal action against ANZ and ASB banks. 'We're just a hardworking Kiwi family trying to pay off our mortgage, struggling sometimes, and we should just be able to trust our bank that they're going to do the right thing in disclosing the right information,' Simons said. But, after four years battling through the courts, the Government last week passed the first reading of the legislation which changed the rules — retrospectively. Banks entitled to 'judicial fairness' – Minister The Minister for Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Scott Simpson, said the bill before Parliament did not affect the class action. ADVERTISEMENT 'What it does is it gives the courts the ability to use their discretion about what will be a fair and equitable outcome to the case,' he said. 'Banks, no matter what you may or may not think of them, are surely entitled to the same judicial fairness as any other entity or person.' A Cabinet paper by the minister released last month highlighted the class action against the banks, adding that "addressing these concerns through retrospective legislation is likely to attract criticism". 'Well, there will be criticism because it is retrospective and retrospective legislation is unusual but not completely unknown in our political system,' Simpson said. Russell claimed it was unfair. 'We've taken it right through to the Supreme Court and, right where we're getting to crunch time, the banks have contacted their mates in the National Party who have agreed to potentially wipe these refunds. It's hundreds of millions of dollars,' he said. Possible changes 'don't take any rights away from consumers' – banks ADVERTISEMENT ANZ and ASB Bank said the proposed amendments to the bill would not halt the current class action – or future cases. In a statement to 1News, ANZ said the proposed amendments "will not stop the current class action progressing, nor will it prevent potential future cases". "They will simply confirm that when considering these cases, the court has discretion to decide what a fair outcome should be. This change does not remove the rights and protections of consumers.' ASB Bank, meanwhile, told 1News that the potential changes "don't take any rights away from consumers, and will not prevent the current court case, or any future cases, from proceeding". "They simply clarify a confusing piece of legislation and confirm that the court has jurisdiction to decide on an outcome that is fair and reasonable.' Simpson added that, currently, for cases that occurred between 2015 and 2019, the courts could only hand down one penalty. 'And that is a full refund of all interest and all fees, no matter how small or minor the error or omission was,' he said. ADVERTISEMENT But Russell said penalties "are clear under the legislation". "All of a sudden, those penalties are being wiped out and replaced with something that's not clear which is what is a reasonable penalty.' While all three coalition parties supported the bill at its first reading, NZ First had concerns about the retrospective aspect and wanted to hear more official advice and public feedback before deciding if it would back the bill entirely. The issue would now be considered by a Parliamentary select committee.
