Monday brings the start of the sixth, essentially final, leg of the banking royal commission.

A fortnight of public hearings will examine insurance.

There's a coda in November, when the bosses of Australia's big four banks — Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and NAB — are expected to be grilled on their organisations, and on the implications of the draft report (due to be released at the end of this month).

But before we move on, let's look back.

It's easy to forget the commission — born in political acrimony less than a year ago — has delivered some truly gob-smacking shocks. Here are just a few:

I fee dead people

Much of the royal commission has been concerned with scandals around "fee for no service", where customers were charged without a service provided.

Although it was originally thought to be a $200 million problem, it's now expected AMP and the banks have stolen more than $1 billion from their own customers.

Commonwealth Bank took it to the next level, taking money from customers who'd been dead for up to a decade.

Relatives of the dead complained about it before internal and external reports were commissioned that splayed out the extent of the problem.

The bank then sat on those for two more years, before eventually informing the regulator they'd broken the law.

The law requires banks to tell the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) about any "breaches" within 10 days.

Great introduction

NAB's "Introducer" program rewarded people like solicitors and accountants for referring customers to its home loans, but it ran off the rails in greater western Sydney.

One "introducer", believed to be a tailor, referred $122 million in home loans and reaped an astonishing $488,000 in fees.

The benefits were so lucrative, cash bribes in paper envelopes were given to brokers to help them overlook fraudulent or missing details in applications — and keep the fees coming.

NAB didn't notify the regulator until months after they were required to — after they had internally discussed a "straw man" (a potentially fallacious example) to deceive the regulator.

Credit cards and problem gamblers

David Harris had racked up more than $35,000 in credit card debt.

He told CBA he had a gambling problem and asked the bank to stop offering him increases to his credit limit —but they kept coming.

"Two of the hardest things you can do with any addiction is, one, admit you've got a problem, and two, reach out for help — and in that phone call with Commonwealth I tried to do both," Mr Harris told the royal commission.

"I tried to reach out for help and I couldn't get any.

"I got the opposite, I got credit limit increases sent through and I tried to tell them I had a problem."

The bank's executive general manager of retail products Clive van Horen admitted the bank had made a mistake, and now flags customers spending big on gambling and doesn't offer them credit limit increases.

AMP

Where do you start?

The company misled the regulator so many times a witness was forced to explain it "lost count".

The commission asserted it was 20-times. AMP later submitted it was seven.

AMP's then-chairman, Catherine Brenner, suggested changes to an apparently independent report by law firm Clayton Utz — asking for the then-chief executive Craig Meller's name to be taken off the list of people interviewed in its preparation.

An internal AMP report said letting customers know they were paying fees for no service could lead to calls for compensation. And worse, informing punters "would be a very negative customer experience".

Astonishingly, even after it paid back the money, AMP kept lying to customers.

A call centre script showed workers were told to tell customers, if they asked about the refunded fees, it was an "administrative error".

It was a business decision, and one AMP is still paying for.

Pushing a family to homelessness

When it comes to galling decisions, it's impossible to forget the fourth-generation Victorian farmers who got into financial difficulty with their ANZ loans.

ANZ gave the Cheesman family just six weeks to sell their properties, and a week to leave.

A bank report said including their homes in the sale of the farming land would decrease the value of the deal — because potential buyers just wanted the land, not houses.

ANZ's head of lending services Benjamin Steinberg was forced to answer why ANZ was so intent on pushing them out, when the bank would likely recoup less money than if the Cheesmans kept the homes.

Mr Steinberg maintained the bank's actions, at no time, fell below community standards and expectations — a phrase the commission has used to define "behaviour".

That's because, he said, ANZ had kept true to its word.

"I know this sounds harsh, and you can tell that I'm finding it hard to say this," Mr Steinberg said.

"But when you analyse it clinically, what we did in this case is we did what we said we were going to do".

$3.6 billion windfall, $1.25 million fine

In the most recent session, the royal commission investigated how ANZ got its bank tellers to sell a superannuation product.

The bank's chief risk officer thought the scheme could end up closing the bank, describing the risk as "extreme" in a report presented to the commission.

"Regular breaches … would be seen by the regulator as systemic, putting ANZ's licence at risk," the risk officer wrote.

Despite knowing the risk — and that tellers weren't qualified to sell superannuation products — ANZ forged ahead.

Bank tellers pushed Smart Choice Super until ASIC forced them to stop, earning the bank $3.6 billion in funds under management.

ANZ has kept that money and will continue to profit from it for decades.

ASIC and ANZ then came to an agreement about the scandal, an "enforceable undertaking" that avoided the cost and uncertainty of court action.

The bank agreed to stop selling super through bank tellers and paid a fine.

That fine? $1.25 million.