Settling six large legal actions against Westpac as a job lot says plenty about the resources consumed by the bank and by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission in the four-year post-financial services royal commission clean up.

The bundling of this settlement allows the regulator to tick a number of boxes on the actions it needed to take to financially punish Westpac for a range of alleged offences and misconduct.

It allows ASIC to notch up a handy win, polish its star and brandish its credentials as a results regulator - all while saving money.

For Westpac chief executive Peter King, aka “the clean-up man”, it is an opportunity to mark the to-do list with six ticks. (One of the unsettled issues is said to be close to agreement and there should be closure soon.)

Sure, it’s a reminder of the number of Westpac’s alleged compliance failures but better to rip off the bandaid than endure the slow-drip of individual transgressions. Taken individually, each of them would have been a headline-making nightmare for the bank.

The most jaw-dropping is the charging of fees for financial advice to dead customers. That always rated very highly on the avarice scale. Next is charging for duplicate insurance policies and levying customers for insurance policies to which they had not consented.

Westpac’s BT Funds Management, meanwhile, was pinged for charging banned commissions as part of insurance premiums, while the bank’s licensees, BT Financial Advice, Securitor and Magnitude took fees for advice that weren’t disclosed.

Additionally, Westpac didn’t deal with deregistered company accounts and continued to charge fees. Lastly, the bank on-sold credit card debt with a higher interest rate than it was allowed to charge resulting in already financially distressed customers being charged too much interest.

This woeful collection of issues has a common theme - the bank was lacking the proper systems and processes needed to ensure these things didn’t happen.