ANZ's profit is on the mend but nowhere near being cured, if you use its result for the nine months to June 2015 as a benchmark to measure its latest profit result against.Yesterday the bank announced a statutory net profit for the nine months to June 2016 of A$4.3 billion. ANZ said its cash profit was $5.2 billion, down $200 million.If the comparator is the first six months of the bank's current financial year then ANZ is looking up. For its March half year ANZ reported a net profit of $2.7 billion, which at the time was a fall of 22 per cent compared with the previous corresponding period. On a cash basis profit for that six month period fell 24 per cent to $2.8 billion.Management of credit quality, a controversy six months ago, may be harder to fix.For the first nine months ANZ said its total provision charge was $1.4 billion (comprised of individual provisions of $1.34 billion and collective provisions of $60 million.)ANZ observed in its trading update that "the third quarter individual provision charge was in line with the average of the first half" - that is, it did not improve.In an interview with its in-house publication BlueNotes, ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott said "the world we're living in at the moment is one of subdued growth.""We see that right across most of the world but that's also starting to be much more true here in Australia," he said."We want to be prepared for that slow-growth environment and that says that much more of our focus is on righting our own ship and getting our costs under control and that theme certainly came through in the nine-month result."Elliott's rhetoric on direction laid emphasis on domestic markets: "There continue to be opportunities for growth in retail and commercial in Australia and New Zealand, and in institutional banking including business supporting trade and capital flows in Asia."In one glimmer of insight on a business initiative Elliot said Apple Pay (a product exclusive to ANZ among local banks) and Android Pay in Australia had seen the bank "attract significant numbers of new to bank retail customers and helped deepen relationships with our existing customers."