NAB tech and investment spend up $80 million

NAB’s technology spending and costs have shot up in the past six months amid heightening compliance and security pressures.

The bank's tech and investment spending grew by $80 million during its last half year due to additional licensing and support costs, cloud and mainframe usage, and technology resilience spending.

In addition, higher operating costs of 5.8 percent – or $256 million – were primarily attributed to a “continued uplift” in technology and compliance capabilities including fraud and cyber security.

Speaking at the bank's 2024 half-year results, recently appointed CEO Andrew Irvine spoke of NAB’s ongoing digital transformation drive, which includes the rollout of out of a single CRM for all bankers and making greater use of data and analytics.

“Our ambition is to deliver consistently good experiences for all of our customers. This is an area we clearly have more to do,” he said.

Following on from its acquisition of Citigroup’s Australian consumer business in 2021, NAB has since migrated 425,000 Citi mortgage, deposit and wealth customers onto its own systems.

Since then, NAB has also been developing a new unsecured lending platform, which it planned to migrate Citi customers onto by the end of this year.

“This is, however, a complex project and it’s important we get it right,” Irvine said.

“We’ve decided to extend the integration and migration timeline by 12 months to December 2025.

“Although it will take us longer to exit the transitional Citi agreement globally, I’m pleased to confirm the cost synergies are on track."

Touching on cyber security, the bank said it has recovered $260 million in scam losses since 2021, including $60 million in the last half year.

Since the launch of its alerts for potential scam payments in March 2023, NAB said it has now seen $90 million of transactions abandoned after customers received the alert messages.

While noting the positive result, Irvine added “together we have more to do”.