National Australia Bank to Compensate Customers Hit by Outage

(Bloomberg) -- National Australia Bank Ltd. said it will ensure no customers suffer financial losses after a nationwide system outage left Internet banking, ATMs and EFTPOS terminals out of service early Saturday.

The event was “incredibly rare” and no personal data was compromised, Cindy Batchelor, NAB Business executive general manager, told reporters in Melbourne, according to a transcript. She said all customers were invited to speak with the bank about the impact on their business.

“Our intention is to work with each and every one of them to make sure they have no financial loss associated with the outage,” she said. If there was a loss driven by the outage, “yes compensation will be provided to customers.”

The outage comes at an awkward time, with Australian banks under pressure from a probe that’s exposed a decade of unethical practices by the lenders, including lying to regulators, falsifying documents and taking bribes to extracting fees from dead customers.

NAB’s outage struck at about 7:50 a.m. on Saturday and by 2 p.m. all systems were back up and running, Batchelor said.

“It’s an incredibly rare event and it took a number of hours for our technicians to be able to bring the systems back up," she said. “It has had an incredible impact on our customers and for that we’re incredibly sorry.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Heath in Sydney at mheath1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stanley James at sjames8@bloomberg.net, John McCluskey

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