Briefs: Moody's rates BOCAL, NAB settles on AWS

Moody's said it assigned first-time long-term and short-term issuer ratings of A3 and Prime-2 to Bank of China (Australia) Limited, which is wholly owned by Bank of China Limited (BOC, A1 stable). The outlook for the rating is stable. BOCAL is focused on Australian residential mortgage lending and over the past 15 months the bank has more than doubled its loan book, “reflecting strong business growth aspirations and expanded distribution channels” Moody’s said. “The bank's problem loans were 0.2% as of December 2019, and the proportion of loans deferred since the virus outbreak has been well below the system average”. The bank's Common Equity Tier 1 ratio was 27.1% as of June 2020.

NAB said it completed “the successful migration of NAB Connect to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the first major Australian bank to move its business banking platform to the cloud.” More than 70,000 business customers across Australia use NAB Connect for their online banking requirements. The bank said its processed $141 billion worth of payments processed on NAB Connect in August alone. NAB began working with AWS