National Australia Bank response to Fairfax Media reports regarding NAB Wealth

National Australia Bank today responded to reports in Fairfax Media regarding NAB’s Wealth business.

Group Executive, NAB Wealth, Andrew Hagger said “NAB’s values are built on respect for customers and employees, and doing the right thing.

“When we identify or are made aware of issues in our business, we will always work to fix them. Our customers and our regulators hold us to high standards and so they should. They deserve a high standard and we are constantly improving our systems and processes to deliver that high standard.

“Where we have problems we face into them. When this has meant providing compensation to our customers who have received bad advice, we have done so.

“Over the past five years, we have compensated over 750 customers and paid out between $10 and $15 million in compensation in situations where we didn’t get it right the first time. We have over 1.7 million customers and clearly we want our customers to get the right advice and good advice every time. But where we have problems we will face into them and fix them,” Mr Hagger said.

Following the release of the Senate Economics Reference Committee inquiry in June last year, NAB commissioned a report into its Wealth business to review and determine whether it needed to change its standards for customers, employees and advisors.

“We were transparent with this information, with our senior management team, the NAB Principal Board and our regulators,” Mr Hagger said.

“We take these issues very seriously. When we identify or are made aware of issues we will always work to fix them. We perform regular audits and where we see problems we will highlight them because we want to fix them.

“If there are issues in our business we encourage our employees to use our Whistleblower process, or for our customers to contact us on 132 652. If they are unsatisfied we want them to reach out to the regulators.

“NAB believes in doing the right thing. We respect our customers and employees and are committed to dealing with issues in a fair, honest and transparent way.”