Commonwealth Bank boss Ian Narev says the bank is proud of its response to the scandal in its financial advice division, despite many victims still waiting for compensation.
More than 7,000 customers came forward with formal complaints about poor financial advice as part of a review launched last year but so far only a fraction of those have been paid compensation.
Mr Narev on Tuesday defended the drawn out process, saying the bank had needed to catalogue more than 900,000 documents going back 10 years so far.
"We are actually proud of the way we've now responded through the open advice review program," he told a Sydney business lunch.
"You've got to accept that in the short term you will wear some criticism for being slow."
But he conceded the bank had taken too long to initially respond to customer complaints.
"What we weren't doing a good enough job of is listening to those voices saying `actually the experience we had wasn't a good experience and we've got something more to tell you," he told the lunch.
A Senate report into the bank's financial advice business last year blasted CBA over its response, or lack thereof, to cases of fraud and misconduct in the division.
That included cases where customers lost large amounts of their life savings after being switched into high risk investment products without their consent and instances of financial planners forging client signatures to allow profit-producing product switches.
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