In the bowels of Parliament House, the Commonwealth Bank's chief Executive Officer Ian Narev strode confidently into the main committee room and took his seat.
Just beyond him, cameras clicked and flashed. Beyond the cameras, members of parliament took their own seats, ready for a showdown.
More Business Videos
Fab four's greatest hits
The CEOs of the four big banks sing from the same song sheet at a parliamentary inquiry - to a hard-to-please audience.
Narev began by steadily reading a prepared statement.
"We come here today with a spirit of openness and a willingness to listen carefully to suggestions about areas in which we can improve," he said.
He had arrived well-prepared, but he also had a lot to be nervous about. After a string of scandals at the Commonwealth Bank, his appearance was perhaps the most hyped, as the first of four chief executives from Australia's biggest banks to be grilled as part of a banking inquiry set up by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Anticipation surrounding the inquiry had been mounting for days, with different parties seeking to frame the hearings according to their own agendas.
During the previous weekend, Labor MP Matt Thistlewaite, the deputy chair of the House Economics committee conducting the inquiry, made a splash by promising explosive new evidence.
"Our evidence and questions will demonstrate that unethical behaviour and scandals do continue," he said.
![Popular support for a royal commission remains strong.](/web/20161010030538im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/x/n/a/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grx4f9.png/1475845787271.jpg)
The government was also laying groundwork. It hoped the appearances by the banking chiefs would dampen the public's fury at the banks and support for a royal commission into the sector - an idea the Coalition has repeatedly rejected.
On Monday morning, Turnbull was promising a display of accountability.
![Emmaline and Rainer Mathews, with their daughter.](/web/20161010030538im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/7/4/1/7/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.grx4f9.png/1475845787271.jpg)
"It is very important to have a change to the culture of accountability, so that appearance before the people's representatives, in the people's house in Canberra, is part of the banking calendar," he said.
The opposition was hoping the inquiry, with its limited scope, would help the case for a royal commission.
On Tuesday morning, before Narev had even taken his seat, Opposition leader Bill Shorten was dismissing the the outcome of the three day inquiry.
"Does anyone think that by Friday the banks are going to start challenging the way they remunerate the big CEOs, where they get rewarded on profits rather than people? Does anyone think that there's going to be any change to the pathology in the industry which sees scandal after scandal?" he said.
At the same time Treasurer Scott Morrison took to the airwaves describing the inquiry as a chance for the banks to explain themselves.
"They have to explain what they do to their customers, to their shareholders, to the Australian public," he said.
Sitting in the committee room on Tuesday, Narev tried to set the tone by outlining the twin themes of his appearance - strength and fairness.
"These are among the most critical characteristics of an effective banking system, because it's through the combination of strength and fairness that we build and we sustain trust."
Moved to tears
Rainer Mathews has had personal experience of the bank's approach to fairness. In 2014 his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the day after the birth of his daughter.
He asked his bank, BankWest, owned by the Commonwealth Bank, for some mortgage relief, but his initial application was refused. He'd never missed a payment and had only 20 per cent left owing on his mortgage.
He eventually received hardship assistance, but it tapered off when he needed it most, forcing him to return to work in the final months of his wife's life.
In Canberra, Labor MP Pat Conroy detailed the Mathews' story to the committee room before asking Ian Narev and his chief risk officer David Cohen how it was allowed to happen. Cohen expressed regret.
"Generally speaking we do the right thing by customers. It is not a decision with the benefit of hindsight we would have made. We gave the [mortgage relief] the second time round. We should have done it first time round," he said.
Mathews was watching the inquiry live on on his phone.
"I was really moved to tears," he says.
"The way the bank treated me and my family while my wife was dying with cancer was devastating for us in so many ways. I've tried to talk about this with the bank on lots of occasions but have always been dismissed out of hand. Getting an acknowledgement from the CEO that they might have done the wrong thing really means a lot to me."
But he doesn't believe his case was an isolated one, and he still thinks a royal commission is needed to stop his experience being repeated.
"I support the call for a royal commission because my experience is that current problems with the banks are systemic, and a royal commission would be well suited to teasing these out," he says.
Stories like these don't help the government. The banking chiefs had barely left Canberra when, on Friday, Turnbull announced a banking tribunal, which would give aggrieved customers a low-cost way to challenge the banks without the expense of going to court.
"What we are working towards is having a one tribunal that deals with consumer claims in the most cost-effective and speedy way to get these matters resolved," he told Adelaide radio on Friday.
It's an idea that has support across the Government, including among key backbenchers, who have in the past expressed sympathy with the idea of a royal commission.
But in a telling sign, Turnbull announced his support before his own expert panel reported back its findings on whether the idea has value. The Ramsay Review, established in May and headed by Melbourne University's Professor Ian Ramsay, is still examining the merits of combining various dispute resolution bodies into a single body.
In the inquiry, chief executives all agreed that the tribunal idea had merit. It was one of many issues Narev was asked about during his appearance. In Canberra, he deftly answered questions about credit card rates, executive remuneration, scandals in life insurance and financial planning, data-sharing, workplace diversity, home-loan rates and others.
He refused to be goaded by theatrics, and skilfully navigated questions.
Tragic cases
At one point Labor MP Pat Conroy confronted Narev with a laundry list of tragic cases and issues from within the bank's life insurance arm CommInsure, including the denial of a claim to a terminally-ill father.
"I will submit that you can't call these a few isolated examples because there's culture of here, of contradicting medical advice, contradicting legal authorities such as coroners, within your CommInsure organisation," he said.
Narev responded with: "I come back to what I said before on two important points; a number of these customers I personally met with and their situation is tragic. I want no risk of being misunderstood on that. I come back to the point of saying if we're talking about a period where we paid 100,000 claims, what I'm not going to do is come back and start reading the names of the 99,000 people who said they had a good experience," he said.
There were no gotcha moments or embarrassing slip-ups. It was a polished performance.
When he was asked about the banks' intimidating profits margins, Narev spoke about the importance of strong banks. When confronted with individual tales of tragedy, he expressed remorse, but always added that this was not the experience of most customers. When he was asked about the big scandals in life insurance and financial services, he spoke about the efforts the bank was going to, to put things right and be transparent about it.
One area where the bank has pledged transparency is with CommInsure. A joint Fairfax-Four Corners investigation exposed how the bank was relying on out-of-date medical definitions to stop paying out trauma claims to heart-attack victims. On the eve of Narev's appearance the bank posted an update on its internal review into the scandal which found 17 instances of the practice.
But when asked how many of these individuals were still alive to benefit from the review, the bank declined to release the number. "These are confidential customer cases," a spokeswoman said.
For some the inquiry was less than revealing.
"It was like a conversation going on in two languages - Narev was delivering a corporate message, a message to the market and messages to shareholders….And then there were the politicians playing to the public," says Peter Lewis, a communications specialist with Essential Media.
"At least on day one, it was Narev who was able to keep it on corporate messaging and not be drawn down that path...the parliament has extraordinary power to get people to a table but it hasn't got the power to go much further beyond that."
But whether this helps the banks and the government avoid a royal commission is less clear. Lewis says Narev's anodyne appearance may, in fact, have just served to demonstrate why a royal commission is needed.
"The banks are stronger and more profitable than they have ever been. They are immune from any censure, so they need a circuit breaker. Clearly what happened this week was not that circuit breaker," he says.
"The skill with which the bankers stared down the politician lent weight to the political argument that this needs a judicial response."
But if Narev sailed through day one, the same could not be said for some that followed.
Curly questions
On day two ANZ's Shayne Elliott all but made the case for a royal commission when asked a simple question by Nationals MP Kevin Hogan.
"Why do you think you're here?" Hogan asked.
Shayne Elliott said he felt banks had lost their their way.
"I think as an industry we've lost touch with our customers and we have become too internally focused and forgotten our role in society at large. That's taken us down a path that's led to bad behaviours and poor culture and really not treated customers with the respect they deserve," he said.
On day three, NAB's chief Andrew Thorburn stumbled on some questions, like why 43 financial planners, who left due to misconduct, were not reported to the corporate regulator.
Labor MP, Matt Thistlewaite asked whether the planners dismissed at NAB had been reported to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
"Oh, they will know about those now," Thorburn replied.
Thistlewaite pressed again. "Those individuals, were they reported by your organisation to ASIC," he asked.
"They will know about those now, for sure," Thorburn repeated.
A perplexed Thistlewaite further pressed the banking chief. "How will they know about them if you didn't report them," he asked.
Thorburn finally admitted the planners hadn't been reported to ASIC.
"Well we didn't report them at the time, and, okay let's be very clear on this, we have very strict rules that are and were in existence and we were reporting what we thought was appropriate to report to ASIC, at the time," he said.
It was only Westpac, which had arguably the fewest skeletons in its closet, that seemed to sail through.
At one one point Westpac chief executive Brian Hartzer was even "congratulated" by Liberal MP Julia Banks, on his bank's policies on discrimination and diversity.
Speaking after the inquiry, Hartzer described the grilling as an altogether positive experience.
"I felt [MPs] were quite reasonable and I was pleased with the calibre of the questions," he said.
But he would not be drawn on the performance of his rival banks.
"I don't think it is for me to comment on competitors."
Performance art
Committee hearings are always half fact-finding expeditions and half performance theatre. The ability to control the room and set the tone is a rare skill. Some of the best performances have become the stuff of legend.
Kerry Packer famously turned the tables on his accusers when he was quizzed on his tax affairs by a parliamentary inquiry in 1991 (video above).
"There are people out there who want to invest in this country and they want to invest because they think it's a stable decent country...why would anyone want to invest in Australia? The laws get twisted and changed...and I think the people out there whose jobs are being pissed up against the wall, don't thank you for it," he said at the time.
The seasoned inquiry professionals are usually found in the senate. Many a businessman and government mandarin has sweated under questioning from past masters like John Faulkner and Christine Milne.
"You can't outsmart them, you have to show the farce of the system," said one seasoned Labor parliamentarian.
"The question shouldn't be 'is this legal' it should be 'why is this legal'.
And it didn't help that Greens member Adam Bandt was asking questions via speaker phone while awaiting the birth of his child - his was a voice from the wings not from the stage.
Steven Munchenberg, chief executive, of the Australian Bankers Association spoke with chief executives after their appearances.
"It's pretty intense experience for individuals who aren't used to three hours of public grilling" he says.
"My sense that coming out of it, it tended to reinforce the view already has that we need to get on and fix these issues."
He said the inquiry was useful because it gave banks a chance to explain complex issues, and believes that it helped to show that a Royal Commission would just be a waste of time.
"This was a big opportunity for Labor to prosecute their case for a Royal Commission and I thought a lot of their line of questioning was perplexing...we got questions about ATM fees and whether people had been sent letters; I was surprised," he says.
"If Labor had a real powerful argument for having a royal commission then they could have demonstrated it."
Poll positions
The Australian Bankers Association has put together its own package of measures designed to address core concerns about the industry including staff remuneration, the treatment of whistleblowers, the handling of customer complaints and dealing with poor conduct.
But popular support for a royal commission remains strong. An Essential Media poll indicates it means more to people than the plebiscite on same-sex marriage, having a treaty with indigenous Australians and having a referendum on becoming a republic.
Peter Lewis believes anger against the banks doesn't just stem from the rash of scandals over recent years, but also from the anti-establishment fervour that contributed to the resurgence of politicians like Pauline Hanson.
"The banks are a symbol, they make billions of dollars in profit and there are proven cases of them treating individuals really poorly. For them to merely front up and say 'were sorry' and that Australia has a strong banking sector misses the point," he says.
But inside Labor, whatever the performance of its MPs, the view is that this week has been a big win. Internal polling by the party leading up to the inquiry showed that anger at the banks remains raw and crosses party lines.
"The simple fact that we have just had an entire week talking about banks as an issue is a win, the issue is strong for us. The proof is that Bill [Shorten] hasn't stopped talking about it" says one senior Labor source.
"This is the most powerful issue going around. It's a vote shifter, it crosses party lines...there is no benefit for backing down from it now."