A convenience afforded any member of the legal and banking fraternities may be denied the underclass, if royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne follows up an idea raised yesterday."If you wanted a formal overdraft, you would have to apply, and the bank would have to meet the responsible lending obligations," Hayne mused yesterday at a hearing in Darwin.Hayne asked one expert witnesses "do either of you see any problem in saying 'no' to informal overdrafts in a basic account" after his royal commission into misconduct in banking explored financial mischief among indigenous communities.Nathan Boyle, a senior policy analyst with the Indigenous Outreach Program within the Financial Capability team at ASIC, told Hayne: "Overdrafts, or informal overdrafts on banking accounts where people have a debit card and go to an ATM - for a lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, if money comes out of their bank account they think that they did have money in their bank account. "So we see a lot of people being charged quite significant fees where they've had a direct debit dishonour or where their account has gone into overdraft and they really weren't aware that overdrafts existed or that there were fees attached to that." Boyle said. "Some of the overdraft facilities don't have monetary limits, so it can be a person's entire [salary or benefit] payment that goes to that overdraft, which means that the person becomes trapped in an overdraft cycle, where they are continuously paying overdraft fees and always receiving less and less of their income."Boyle had plenty of background for Hayne on the social context of indigenous users selecting financial services. "Identification issues emerge really at two key points in the banking system," he explained. "So the first is at establishing a bank account, if you don't have adequate identification documentation, it can be almost impossible to even open a standard bank account."Boyle said: "this means a proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are completely financially excluded and don't have access to even basic financial products. "The second place that we see identification play a role was where someone might lose a debit card, for example, or lose a banking product and need to have a new card issued. And they will contact their bank via the telephone, and it can be quite difficult for people to identify themselves or to answer the questions that are asked over the telephone. "Sometimes, we see financial services [providers] have policies about the types of questions that are asked and they can only ask questions in a certain way which might not make sense to an Aboriginal person in a remote community."