NAB scraps fees in ‘clean-up program’

The big four bank said the clean-up, which began in May, aimed to reduce complexity and reduce complaints.

In its announcement in May, NAB had said that it would remove and reduce some of the 400 fees it charges to customers, including removing 50 fees charged to business banking customers by the end of June 2019.

By the end of September, NAB will no longer charge legal fees for business lending customers, which currently attract more than 2,000 complaints per year.

It will also remove repeat statement fees when customers request bank statements, as well as fees applied when issuing or cashing foreign currency (fee applied on top of conversion rate).

Commenting on the changes, NAB chief customer officer Rachel Slade said the bank listened to customer feedback and reduced the number of fees, making them simpler and easier to understand.

“It’s an important milestone to eliminate 100 fees and the need for an entire ‘legal fees and charges booklet’ detailing fees previously charged to business lending customers,” she said.

“We anticipate it will simplify our business, too, with thousands less calls for information and support coming to our customer contact centres.”

A $10 monthly service fee for access to NAB Connect was removed in July. Since then, customer applications have increased 5 per cent.

NAB said more than 8,000 customers have saved on $15 credit card late payment fees following the introduction of a waiver for customers who had paid the minimum monthly amount due on time in the 11 previous months.

The bank has sent more than 1.8 million SMS credit card payment reminders to customers since launching in March 2019. Together, these actions have seen an estimated 30 per cent reduction in credit card late payment fee complaints.

NAB previously announced it would end its introducer payments program from 1 October 2019, and said it will no longer make referral payments to introducers from this date. 

[Related: NAB supplies fintech with $57m loan facility]

Malavika Santhebennur is the features editor on the mortgages titles at Momentum Media.

Before joining the team in 2019, Malavika held roles with Money Management and Benchmark Media. She has been writing about financial services for the past six years.