NAB's mortgage victims kept waiting for redress
The examination of NAB's executive general manager for broker partnerships, Anthony Waldron continued yesterday until lunchtime. He was grilled over the bank's previous incentive plans and the methods used by dishonest staff to game the system, contrasted with the situation now, and what fixes were in place.Waldron responded by telling the hearing that NAB has been reviewing its files and had so far identified 1360 people "potentially impacted" by the dishonest conduct of its staff. That is, NAB has reviewed about 70 per cent of the estimated files.Next step is remediation, but that could be a long time coming."Last Friday, we had identified there would be about 26 [of] those that we would be making offers to over the next little while, and as [this] is also in a remediation process, it requires a sign-off process both internally and through our external experts to get to that point," Waldron said. "We are literally about to move into making those offers." Also laid bare were the previous shortcomings of NAB's incentives scheme.Rowena Orr, counsel assisting, put it to Waldron that, in lay terms, and using the bank's own internal assessments, "... because your recruitment training and accreditation was not fully effective, there were bankers in your organisation who did not understand what they had to do to comply with your policies and to comply with the law...."And another finding was that "NABs processes were inadequate to detect fraud because bankers were relied on to do the right thing."Orr, translating bank jargon into lay terms, summarised: "... bankers weren't being adequately monitored to ensure that they were doing the right thing and changes to processes weren't being made where they were doing the wrong thing ..." Waldron agreed this time, noting the "... management loop of feedback needed to also be down at individual banker level... not just branches or local areas as well.""Some of our processes and controls were business unit specific, rather than being enterprise specific, and so something [that] might have been picked up in, for example, in a consumer banking area, that same issue might be arising somewhere else but that was not being necessarily foreseen right across the bank," Waldron said. "And the scorecard is different for different roles within the bank. But for the roles that you are talking about, that will have a customer service component, which is almost everybody in NAB."So, there is a strong customer relations aspect to this scorecard, with ranking from 'outstanding' down to 'not achieved' applied, with 25 to 45 per cent of bonus amount being at risk for misconduct," Waldron explained, noting that the incentive scheme had been updated, but some aspects remained essentially the same as they were back in 2015.