Westpac NZ CEO David McLean decided front footing the issue was the way to go after a report into pay equity at the bank found a gender pay gap of 30.3 per cent. McLean approached Radio NZ to speak about his "shock" when he found out. "At Westpac we'd spent a long time working on things like pay equity, women in leadership … we thought 'Wow, we've done a great job'. But when we looked at our pay gap it was quite a startling number," he said. McLean agreed to feature on the RNZ/Newsroom podcast The Detail about how it is a problem for society, and what the bank intends to do. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Financial Markets Authority have expressed their disappointment with the "underwhelming" response from life insurers operating in the Kiwi market to this year's conduct and culture review. After the review, released in January, found issues of unfair treatment of customers and concerns over sales incentives, insurers were told to clean up their act and report back by June. But now the regulators say "significant work is still needed to address the issues of weak governance and ineffective management of conduct risk, identified in the regulators' report earlier this year… It's clear that progress has been slow and not as far-reaching as required… Some providers have started work to identify the customer and conduct issues they face, others have not provided any detail on this." The two regulators are still holding back from naming and shaming companies. The latest report has sparked renewed calls in the media for a NZ Royal Commission into banking, insurance and financial services. Kiwibank appears ready to launch a new campaign (perhaps wrapped around the Rugby World Cup) deliberately designed to harness New Zealander's rivalry with Australia, Newsroom reports. At a business breakfast CEO Steve Jurkovich asked the Kiwi audience why, if they wouldn't back the Wallabies to win the World Cup, they back them for their banking? "There is $5 billion a year going back to Australia, by my calculation that's $600,000 every hour. We call it the Kangaroo dividend. Do you want to support that or not?" Jurkovich said, promising a more aggressive approach from the locally-owned bank.