National Australia Bank (NAB) asserts submission of SMRs to AUSTRAC

By Edil Corneille

Today, the National Australia Bank (NAB) one of the big 4 financial institutions in the country, asserted that the NAB Suspicious Matter Reports (SMRs) are submitted to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC). SMRs include details of the suspected crime type, as required by law, and the bank mentioned that it would be wrong to suggest otherwise.

The bank confirmed that in July 2019, NAB modernised its internal systems to automate data extraction on cumulative SMR reports. On this basis, analysis of a subset of SMR data was provided to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics in January 2020.

NAB mentioned that it takes its financial crime obligations seriously. The bank stated that it recognises the important role it plays in monitoring and reporting suspicious activity in keeping Australia’s financial system safe.

NAB Group CEO, Ross McEwan told a House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics (September 11, 2020) that NAB has approximately 1,000 people working to pick up on payments going in and out of the system and identifying suspicious transactions.

“We’ve been doing work on making sure we know in detail who our customers are and what activities they’re involved in so that we can start detecting. We still have a lot to do. We’ve made very good progress, in my mind, but we still have a lot to do, and we need to be very open with the committee on that. But we have a program that we’ve shared with AUSTRAC. We’ve taken them through all the milestones we believe we’ll achieve. It comes through a committee on this every month. It comes up to the board at the board meetings, and we do report regularly through into AUSTRAC on progress.

“This is to me a vital issue of keeping Australia safe and stopping parties that shouldn’t be operating in the Australian marketplace operating here. So we don’t see this as just ‘we need to do this to stay out of trouble’. We need to make Australia safe, and that’s the basis we’ve gone into it on as well. But there is lots of work still to do,” the NAB Group CEO said.