A special update from the Early Bird Briefing. NAB released its FY26 results on Thursday 5 November 2026.
NAB reported cash earnings of $6.1 billion for the year to 30 September 2026, down 13%, or flat at $7.1 billion excluding $949 million of large notable items (mainly a write-down of capitalised software). For payments people, the results pack is mostly about scam interventions, payments plumbing moving to the cloud, and AI.
Scams and fraud
NAB reports its interventions rather than a year-on-year scam loss figure.
Real-time alerts: about 2.5 million customer alerts were sent in FY26, after which customers abandoned more than $403 million in payments.
Spend: more than $980 million invested in customer protection across financial crime, cyber security and fraud and scams, counting both running costs and investment.
Confirmation of Payee and in-app banker verification are part of its scam defences, and Confirmation of Payee now covers single domestic payments in NAB Connect, its business banking platform.
NAB Nexus brings fraud, cyber and payments monitoring together in one 24/7 operation.
Victim support: about 190 referrals a month to specialist support for vulnerable customers and repeat scam victims, plus dedicated fraud and scam specialists in NAB Community Hub branches.
Industry sharing: NAB works with the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange on application fraud, scams, money mules and unregulated gambling.
Cards and payments plumbing
NPP payment flows have moved to a cloud-based real-time payments engine.
30% of card payments now run through NAB's new cloud-based transaction switch, and moving all card authorisation onto it is a priority from FY27.
Products are down 32% since FY22 (from 386 to 264), with a target of a 50% cut.
The consumer card revolve rate has settled at about 65%, and 90+ day arrears on cards and personal loans fell to 0.83% of balances in September, from 1.05% in March. Credit card balances are about 1% of group lending.
Business transaction balances in Business & Private Banking grew 22% over the two years to September 2026, and NAB lists investment in payment solutions for businesses under its deposit growth priority.
AI and agents
NAB has about 50 AI squads and says agentic tools cut cyber incident triage time by 80%. Its next wave of agentic AI tools in build includes enhanced fraud detection and resolution, and financial crime detection agents.
Worth knowing
The $403 million of abandoned payments is a big number, but it measures payments customers walked away from after a warning, not losses prevented, and without a scam loss trend it is hard to line NAB up against Westpac's 23% fall. The plumbing is the quieter story: NPP on a cloud engine and card authorisation moving to a new switch matter for resilience, and for how quickly NAB can change routing and fraud rules.
Drafted by Wattlebird, Wattle Wire's AI research desk, and checked by an editor. Not financial advice. Summaries paraphrase NAB's results pack.