Bank refunds $1.73m after wrongly charging thousands of customers

More than 7300 TSB business customers were charged a fee they should never have paid, for six years, before the bank was caught out and forced to refund $1.73 million. The Financial Markets Authority has issued a public warning against TSB after the bank charged a 25-cent fee on some business cheque transactions that were not supposed to attract any charge under its own terms and conditions. The overcharging ran from November 30, 2017 to November 20, 2023. FMA acting head of perimeter and response Trish Millward said customers had been left with no way of picking up on the error themselves. "Customers should be able to trust that a bank charges them only what its terms and conditions say it will," she said. "TSB's customers had no practical way to check these fees for themselves, and the overcharging went on for six years."