Comment: lack of interest on digital wallets, UBank, Nabtrade
NAB group seems to have gone cold on some of its more competitive high-profile digital propositions - if the latest round of presentations and reports is any guide.Bank of New Zealand has drummed up scant interest in its Android Pay mobile wallet and NAB shared no data on demand in Australia. As for Apple Pay, NAB was silent on talks with Apple in stark contrast to ANZ earlier this week - arguably NAB's closest rival among the Big Four.NAB's investor relations team have also quietly deleted any mention of UBank and Nabtrade from their half yearly updates, so these two relatively small but once-profitable business units were last spotted on an investor presentation slide for NAB's 1H 2015 results.UBank - NAB's cautious but well-regarded foray into digital banking - showed mortgage volumes had risen steadily to $3.4 billion from a standing start in 2011, while deposits levels were trending decidedly downwards, from a peak of $18.1 billion in March 2014 to 16.8 billion a year later. Online broker Nabtrade's customer numbers and market share were increasing at double-digit rates. Yesterday's investor presentation showed that while UBank's mortgage book was folded into the retail bank's bar charts for gross loan assets, its customer deposits data were nowhere to be seen.Nabtrade's performance information was omitted from the report altogetherA NAB spokesperson surmised the reason this information was not included since May 2015 (ie, for the half-year to March 2015) was that analysts and shareholders weren't as interested in that information as in the other items reported.