NAB to offer full compensation to customers affected by outage

On Saturday, many Australians were caught out when National Australia Bank expectantly went offline.

NAB, which is one of Australia’s biggest banks, said it was experiencing issues with EFTPOS, ATMS, internet and mobile banking services. This meant people were unable to access money or were being turned away from shopping centres and supermarkets when their cards declined.

NAB’s Executive General Manager Cindy Batchelor has now said there could be compensation available to customers impacted. In addition to shoppers, many business owners lost thousands when they weren’t able to process purchases in stores.

“Every customer has the opportunity to come and talk to us about the impact they’ve had specifically on their business,” Batchelor told press on Saturday after the outage. “And our intention is to work with each and every one of them to make sure they have no financial loss associated with the outage today.”

Batchelor also said customers would get 100 per cent of their losses back if they had proof.

“We have a part of NAB called NAB Resolve that works with each of our customers to really understand exactly what their losses are – so yeah, we would want out customers to come forward and provide us with the facts,” she said. “If they don’t have that information, we will actually work with them to estimate what their losses might have been … If the customer is impacted, our intention is to compensate them for their loss.”

She added “compensation will be provided to customers” by the bank and that NAB will work with individual customers to understand the impact it had on people.

Batchelor said NAB was “sincerely sorry” for what occurred and did her best to explain what went wrong.

“We had a series of failures today, that emanated from a power issue and it isolated our mainframe. It’s an incredibly rare event, but what it did is it took a number of hours for our technicians to be able to bring our systems back up,” she explained. “It was actually a systems failure. So, as I said, it was a power issue. So when the power goes into the systems, there was a disconnect there that impacted a number of our systems, which provide services to our customers.”

Batchelor said she wasn’t sure how many customers were impacted by the outage, but assured customers their personal data hadn’t been compromised in any way. She also said NAB was working every day on new technology to provide reliability to customers.

What do you think? Were you impacted by NAB’s outages on Saturday? Did it leave you in a difficult position?