Macquarie Bank Welcome Rate: How Did a $1,000 Complaint Become a $14 Million Penalty?

On 7 September 2022, a Macquarie Bank customer lodged a complaint with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority. He said he had opened a savings account because Macquarie offered a welcome interest rate above the bank’s standard rate for four months, and that shortly after he opened the account the bank removed the welcome rate. The complaint was one of hundreds the bank would receive about the same product. It is the reason Macquarie is now facing a $14 million penalty.

The ombudsman decided the case on 18 May 2023. It ordered Macquarie to pay the customer $1,000, made up of financial and non-financial loss. The ombudsman had found the welcome rate offer and its terms unclear, and that they had led him to believe the rate would vary and stay above the standard rate for the four months, rather than being set at the offered rate or at the standard rate, whichever was greater. Macquarie paid the $1,000 on 20 June 2023. The file did not close there. The bank’s own review of complaints between December 2021 and December 2024 found 717 complaints about welcome interest rates. Nine of them, from eight customers including the complainant, raised the same issues he had raised. Another 232 came from customers dissatisfied at not being offered a higher welcome rate than the one that applied when they opened their accounts.

On 28 April 2025, the ombudsman determined that a systemic issue had arisen over whether the terms and conditions of the welcome rate offer sufficiently described the promotional interest rates. It found that the unclear wording had affected customers, that other customers may have been affected by the same interpretation issue without complaining, and it endorsed Macquarie’s proposal to remediate customers who had complained and customers who might have been confused. ASIC opened its investigation on 15 August 2025. It filed proceedings in the NSW Supreme Court on 10 November 2026, and the two sides have jointly proposed a $14 million penalty to the court. Macquarie has admitted breaching sections 912A(1)(a) and 912A(5A) of the Corporations Act, which require a licensee to provide its financial services efficiently, honestly and fairly. A spokesperson said the bank will admit in court that it failed to do so, and will not contest the proceeding.

The Macquarie Bank welcome rate was, in the bank’s own filing, a fixed rate that applied instead of the standard stepped variable rate for the first four months, on balances up to $250,000. It was not a bonus on top. But between 1 December 2021 and 9 September 2022, Macquarie’s website described it as a “welcome variable rate” and a “bonus offer”. The December 2021 display showed “1.10% p.a.” beside the words “Welcome variable rate for 4 months”, and the rates section headed the offer “Bonus offer for new Savings Account customers”. The page’s own frequently asked questions section contained the true explanation, that the welcome rate applied “instead of (not in addition to)” the standard rate. The headline said one thing and the small print said the other, and the headline was not fixed until 9 September 2022. The campaign pages were not fixed until August 2023.

A customer signs up at a welcome rate of 2% a year while the standard rate sits at 1.75%. The standard rate rises to 2% during the four months. The customer stays at 2%. The welcome rate does not rise in step. The 0.25-point margin is gone. If the standard rate rose to 2.25%, the customer would get 2.25%, because the welcome rate was lifted to match the standard rate, never above it. Before May 2022 this never mattered, because the Reserve Bank’s cash rate was on hold or falling and the welcome rate always sat above the standard rate. From May 2022 the cash rate rose at eight consecutive meetings, from 0.10% to 3.10% by December, and for the first time the standard rate could overtake the welcome rate inside the four-month window. The product worked as customers imagined it until the month rates started rising, and then it stopped working.

The offer was not a side product. In the period the court filing covers, 37,467 welcome rate savings accounts were opened, which was 66.3% of all the savings accounts Macquarie opened in that period. About $17,199 million went into them, 85.4% of all the money deposited into Macquarie savings accounts in the same period. The welcome rate was the engine of the bank’s deposit growth: its deposit book broke through $200 billion late in 2025, growing 25% in a year against 8% for the market, and its household deposits nearly tripled in four years to about $100 billion. Macquarie holds 6.4% of Australia’s $1.7 trillion deposit market, and its growth has come largely at the big four banks’ expense.

At no point in the relevant period did Macquarie have any internal document or guidance recording that the welcome rate operated as a fixed rate unless the standard rate exceeded it, which staff approving advertisements could have referred to. Advertisements went through a Jira workflow and a document approval system, reviewed by marketing, product, corporate affairs, legal and non-financial risk teams, and none of them detected the risk that customers would be confused by the words “variable” and “bonus”. Between April 2022 and August 2023, while rates were rising fast, changes to the interest rate figures were handled by a “controlled exceptions check” in which three marketing staff verified the new rate against the approved original. The advertisements were approved by staff at senior levels across marketing, product and legal. The parties agree the conduct was not deliberate, but that it involved a lack of the appropriate level of care. In April 2026 Macquarie began a project to fix the governance of its customer-facing communications, after finding inconsistent controls, inadequate auditability and imprecise responsibilities. The further work is scheduled for completion in the first half of 2027.

The remediation is done. Between 3 September 2025 and 15 July 2026, Macquarie paid $8.8 million to 39,566 customers across 34,884 accounts, for accounts opened between 1 January and 19 September 2022. The payments restored the bonus margin the customer had at the date they accepted the offer, and carried interest at 10.35%, the highest cash rate in the period plus the 6% the ombudsman recommends for interest on payments. Customers whose welcome rate margin stayed intact for the whole four months, and who therefore lost nothing, were excluded. For customers who had closed their accounts and did not respond to contact attempts, payments under $500 were donated to charity and larger amounts were remitted to ASIC as unclaimed money. The average payment was about $222.

The same court filing records earlier admissions by the bank. In April 2024 the Federal Court ordered Macquarie to pay $10 million after its bulk transacting system let an adviser take $2.9 million from 13 clients’ cash management accounts. In March 2026 the Federal Court found Macquarie Investment Management had breached the same sections of the Corporations Act over the Shield Master Fund on the Macquarie Wrap platform. Beyond the filing, ASIC imposed additional conditions on Macquarie Bank’s financial services licence in May 2025 after what it called multiple and significant compliance failures. Its disciplinary panel fined the bank a record $4.995 million in September 2024 over suspicious orders on the electricity futures market, and Macquarie Securities was ordered to pay $35 million for misreporting at least 73 million short sales between 2009 and 2024. ASIC has said it has serious and ongoing concerns about longstanding issues at Macquarie, including ineffective supervision, weak compliance and inadequate risk management.

The savers themselves do not agree on what happened to them. On the r/AusFinance thread about the penalty, one user called the case “pretty tame” and said the welcome rate sounded like “just a fixed rate for a period”, not a scam. Another worked the numbers the way a customer in 2022 would have: if the welcome rate was 1.1% and the standard rate was 0.5%, then 1.6% in total “could make sense to a consumer”, adding that nobody thinks it was intentionally misleading, “but that’s not a defence in Australian Consumer Law”. A Macquarie customer on the thread hoped the fine would push the bank to “set a high interest savings rate and just pay it… with no confusing shit added on”, and said he liked Macquarie but had noticed the changes on its website were “quite confusing”. Another customer, who keeps his high-interest savings account with Macquarie because it has “no monthly hoops for the full rate”, said the accusation that the advertising misled people about whether the welcome rate was the rate or was additional to it “is plausible”. The officials’ position is settled: the bank admitted the breach and ASIC says its systems failed. The customers are split between those who read the same words and saw a fixed rate plainly described, and those who read them and found the accusation of misleading advertising plausible.

There is one more piece of the story the coverage has not put together. On 16 September 2025, a month after ASIC opened its investigation into the welcome rate, Macquarie launched a nationwide advertising campaign called “Your savings game changer”, attacking the conditional bonus rates offered by other banks and their “hoops and catches”, and citing the competition regulator’s finding that around 70% of Australian savers regularly fail to meet the conditions on bonus interest accounts. The competition regulator’s own report, published in December 2023, found that 71% of bonus interest accounts did not receive the bonus rate on average each month in the first half of 2023, and that a saver starting with $5,000 and adding $200 a month would earn about $328 in a year at the headline rate of 5.25% but only $18 at the base rate of 0.30% if the conditions were missed. Macquarie’s campaign presented the bank as the one that had rejected that whole game. A year later, on 14 September 2026, the bank withdrew the welcome rate for new accounts. Angel Zhong, a professor of finance at RMIT, put the timing plainly: when interest rates move, promotional offers get louder, and “that is exactly when clear, honest rate disclosure matters most, because small differences in wording can steer big decisions”.

The $14 million is 0.38% of Macquarie Group’s $3,715 million net profit for the year to March 2025. The $14 million and the $8.8 million together come to $22.8 million, 0.61% of that profit. Against the $17,199 million the welcome rate accounts took in, the penalty is 0.08%. The cash rate, which did the damage in 2022, now sits at 4.85%, its highest since late 2008, after five rises this year. ASIC has made pricing practices that affect the cost of living a 2026 enforcement priority.

The court has not yet approved the $14 million penalty the two sides proposed together. The $8.8 million, by contrast, is already paid.