NAB research shows consumers and businesses “are increasingly prepared to make trade-offs for greater protection from scams”.
More than four in 10 Australian consumers “would be ‘extremely prepared’ to experience slower payments processing if they were better protected from scammers, and one in two SMEs are ‘completely prepared’ to sacrifice the time it takes to process a payment if it’s safer,” NAB said in a report yesterday.
“Banks alone can’t solve the growing problem of fraud and scams. It will take a national effort to counter this global organised crime wave,” NAB CEO Ross McEwan said in a speech to Australian Lebanese Chamber of Commerce event in Sydney yesterday.
“In Australia we have 15 big telco pipes coming in that need to be cleaned up. It has been far too easy for criminals to pretend to represent organisations by stealing SMS tags – be that banks, Australia Post, Linkt or the ATO.”
“Across NAB, we have 64 initiatives complete or underway to help protect our customers from the devastating impact of scams. This includes our recent announcement as the first bank to remove links from unexpected text messages to NAB customers.
“Another was the introduction of payment prompts to digital banking for personal customers.
We’ve added targeted friction when a payment is out of character to encourage customers to pause and consider any red flags on where they are sending money.
“It’s having an impact. Since we introduced this measure in late March, we have seen an average of A$250,000 in payments abandoned each day after we raised scam concerns,” McEwan said.