Austrac progresses NAB money-laundering probe

Austrac has progressed its investigation into National Australia Bank’s compliance with anti-money laundering legislation, sending an information request to the bank.

NAB chief executive Ross McEwan gives remote testimony to the House economics committee on September 9, 2021.

Austrac’s anti-money laundering investigation into National Australia Bank has progressed, with the lender currently drafting answers to a number of questions posed by the enforcement division of the financial intelligence agency.

“We will see where it goes from here,” chief executive Ross McEwan told Labor Party MP Andrew Leigh in a House economics committee hearing on Thursday.

NAB announced in June that Austrac had referred concerns about potential AML breaches to its enforcement division.

Mr McEwan also confirmed on Thursday that Project Apollo was a “huge” three-year remediation project, with a further year or more to go, to ensure compliance with “know your customer” requirements.

The project, he said, still had some work to do to achieve full compliance and the bank’s objective of getting the right data into the right place.

Reports have said Apollo involves an examination of hundreds of thousands of customer profiles identified as problematic, with the aim of deleting duplicate accounts and debanking high-risk customers.

Consulting firm Accenture has been called in to help with the project.

In a testy exchange with LNP backbencher Julian Simmonds, Mr McEwan repeatedly stressed that NAB “absolutely” took its AML obligations seriously.

He said the bank had spent $800m on AML compliance over the last 3-4 years, with about 1200 people working on AML and know-your customer issues.

The NAB boss, however, declined to go into detail about Austrac’s concerns, saying it would wait to see what emerged from the regulator’s information request.

Mr Simmonds responded that NAB’s best endeavours were not good enough.

He cited reports of a backlog in suspicious transaction reporting, the bank losing people at a “rapid” rate, and a failure to update customer account information dating back 20 years.

Mr McEwan said NAB was only looking for a handful of people to fill about 20 vacant positions, and institutions all around the world were finding it difficult to get qualified people for regulatory compliance roles.

Originally published as Austrac progresses NAB money-laundering probe