How Litigation Funding Beat the Banks — And Why ANZ Is Still Fighting
When ANZ Bank New Zealand filed its appeal of Justice Geoffrey Venning’s 4 May 2026 summary judgment, it opened the next chapter of a legal saga that has tested not just the limits of consumer finance law, but the boundaries of what banks can do when the law doesn’t suit them, including trying to change it.
It is also followed by the most recent move of a senior jurist to the independent bar, another Bench-to-Bar move that is becoming increasingly common.
The story of Simons v ANZ is, at its core, a story about access to justice. It is a class action victory that arguably would never have been possible without the strategic deployment of litigation funding to level the playing field between individual borrowers and one of the country’s largest financial institutions.
It is a demonstration of what funded class action litigation can achieve and a reminder of the lengths to which well-resourced defendants will go to avoid accountability, including seeking to rewrite the rules of engagement while the game is still in play.
Consumers v. The Bank
Lawyers pursuing the case, led by Auckland firm LawFuel Lawyer of the Year Scott Russell with funding from the LPF Group, argued the law as it stood at the time was clear and required strict compliance, meaning borrowers were entitled to a full refund of interest payments and fees.
Without that funding, the action, brought on behalf of some 17,000 ANZ customers. would almost certainly never have reached the courtroom. Individual borrowers, facing the legal firepower of a major bank, simply cannot sustain years of complex litigation alone.
The Court of Appeal confirmed that the High Court has jurisdiction to issue a common fund order — the first authority of its kind in New Zealand a mechanism enabling litigation funders to share costs across all class members regardless of whether they signed a funding agreement.
The Supreme Court subsequently refused ANZ and ASB’s application for leave to appeal that ruling, meaning the Court of Appeal’s decision stands as the binding authority on the matter. That jurisprudence alone has reshaped the economics of class action litigation in New Zealand, and it emerged directly from this case.
When Banks Lobby Parliament to Change the Rules
The funding battle was only one front. After ANZ realised in 2016 that it had breached its disclosure obligations, the New Zealand Bankers’ Association launched an intensive lobbying operation to get the law changed and to make those changes retrospective. The ANZ did not tell the Commerce Commission about the error until June 2017, over a year after it had lobbied Parliament to change the law.
The banking sector spent the better part of a decade, and a good deal of money, lobbying to have the CCCFA rewritten in ways that would operate retrospectively and specifically, over the last two years, to target a case that had by then already been before the courts for four years.
The Government included clauses in a CCCFA amendment bill that would retrospectively change the legal standard applied for compensation in such cases to “just and equitable,” rather than a blanket reimbursement of payments and unusually, the amendments explicitly named the active Simons class action itself.
The constitutional backlash was swift. Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Select Committee received 1,543 submissions opposing the retrospective action, with legal professionals, academics and constitutional law experts all expressing concerns, against just 15 submissions in support. The Committee ultimately recommended the existing court proceedings be exempted, and the Government agreed.
Lead plaintiff Anthony Simons captured the sentiment of many borrowers. “The fact that banks can lobby and influence government to such an extent that they will retrospectively change the law is scary to me,” he said.
The Judgment
The class action claims that a coding error in one of ANZ’s systems failed to account for interest that had accrued but not yet been charged, meaning loan variation letters sent to customers between 30 May 2015 and 28 May 2016 contained inaccurate information.
The High Court found that ANZ breached section 22 of the CCCFA and directed the bank to refund the representative plaintiffs $32,728.42, a figure that serves as a template for ANZ’s potential exposure across the wider class, which the bank estimates at approximately $125 million.
ANZ argued its errors actually left customers paying less, not more, interest, and that it had already paid out more than $35 million in remediation but Justice Venning was unmoved, finding the CCCFA operates as a strict liability regime. By fighting the case to judgment, ANZ was held to the standard of the law as it was written at the time of the breach the standard they had unsuccessfully lobbied Parliament to change after the fact.
ANZ’s chief executive Antonia Watson confirmed the appeal on the basis that the High Court had incorrectly applied the law, arguing the potential consequences were “disproportionate and not aligned with the purpose of the CCCFA or any actual harm caused.”
ASB Settled — ANZ Is Fighting On
ASB, which faced a much larger class action of 191,000 compared to the ANZ’s class of 17,000, opted to settle its class action in October 2025 for $135.6 million, without any admission of liability or wrongdoing, and has been paying out customers since.
ANZ’s decision to appeal means affected borrowers face further delay and the Court of Appeal now carries the weight of defining, once and for all, what materiality and proportionality mean under the CCCFA’s strict liability framework.
Justice Venning Moves From Bench to Britomart
The judge who delivered that $125 million headache has himself moved on. Britomart Chambers has confirmed that the Hon Justice Geoffrey Venning will join the chambers in 2026, following 10 years as a High Court Judge including five years as Chief High Court Judge.
He noted the significance of the ANZ action in a LinkedIn post announcing his joining Britomart Chambers saying: “. . . these proceedings represent one of New Zealand’s most significant pieces of consumer banking litigation and a landmark in the development of class action procedure. The importance of the case is underlined by the recent decision by ANZ to appeal to the Court of Appeal.”
His focus will be on complex commercial disputes as a mediator and arbitrator, with a particular interest in construction, infrastructure, financial services and insurance matters.
His move is part of a broader shift in how New Zealand’s top legal talent flows after the bench, increasingly blurring the Bench/Bar line.
The trend for retiring judges to return to the bar has grown steadily in New Zealand, mirroring developments in other Commonwealth jurisdictions, with Bankside Chambers also housing a number of returning Court of Appeal and High Court alumni. Venning J’s arrival at Britomart, with direct oversight of some of the most consequential representative proceedings in New Zealand’s legal history, will undoubtedly make him a natural first call for high-value financial services arbitrations and cross-border disputes.
