Briefs: BNZ appoints Chen as director; ASB launches card lock 22 April 2015 3:38PM Banking Day staff Briefs, National Australia Bank's BNZ has appointed prominent public policy lawyer Mai Chen as a director. Chen is managing partner at Chen Palmer and adjunct professor at Auckland University Law School. Chen said she would relish the challenge of working in the banking sector, which she described as "subject to so much disruption and fast-paced change", adding that "the challenge of demographic disruption is as important as technological disruption, especially in a super-diverse market like Auckland. Commonwealth Bank of Australia's New Zealand subsidiary ASB has updated its mobile banking app with new "card control" features allowing customers to temporarily lock their credit or debit cards and impose restrictions on how and where the cards can be used. The bank said 55,000 ASB cards were reported missing each year and the new feature would erase the need to immediately cancel a temporarily misplaced card. ASB's head of credit cards, Glen Martin, said he expected the New Zealand experience would be similar to Australia's, where research showed more than a quarter of credit card holders have been unsure whether they actually lost a card or just left it at home or work. ASB banking app users can also manually limit or block overseas and online purchases, contactless payments and ATM withdrawals. ASB described the online card control features as a "New Zealand first" (although the Co-operative bank released an update to its banking app in mid-February with similar blocking features for ATM cards).