Senior bankers lost contact with the real world, says NAB chief

NAB chief executive Andrew Thorburn has conceded that senior bankers have taken customers for granted.

National Australia Bank chief executive Andrew Thorburn has conceded that senior bankers have taken customers for granted and lost contact with the real world in a “fundamental failure of leadership”.

Just days after his grilling at the parliamentary banking inquiry, Mr Thorburn said NAB”s decision to stop donating to political parties was to stem a public perception it was buying access.

“We have access anyway, and we should rely on that relationship and the power of what we do as a bank without having to be seen that money has to be paid to any political party, for democracy or not,” he said.

The NAB boss, in an interviewed onstage yesterday by journalist Kerry O’Brien at a Queensland University of Technology business leaders’ function in Brisbane, was asked whether he agreed with ANZ boss Shane Elliott’s testimony that big banks had lost touch with customers leading to bad behaviour and poor culture.

Mr Thorburn partly agreed. “We have taken customers for granted,” he said. “We have lost some touch with our people, with our customers. As banks have got bigger and bigger, regulation has become more and more dominant; things like technology and the digital world have enabled so much more non-personal, non-human contact, I think senior people have become less in contact with the real world.

“The point is right, but I think it can be overstated in terms of impact.”

When asked whether this represented a “fundamental failure of leadership” by the banks, he said “Absolutely it is”.

“The first group of people a bank is mobilised to serve is its customers.”

NAB has paid out $15 million to 750 customers for bad advice from financial planners at the bank. Although 43 planners left or were sacked from NAB over four years to 2014, Mr Thorburn insisted it was not a systemic problem.

“The reason it wasn’t systemic was we have 1700 planners in our network (and) this is over three or four years,” he said.

He said the bank had stepped up its monitoring of complaints and over-performing planners attracted more scrutiny.