NAB Is Cutting 2,500 Roles, Mostly in Corporate Functions. The Release Names Proprietary Home Lending as a Priority and Never Mentions Brokers

On 20 October, NAB said it would reduce up to 2,500 internal roles — about 6 per cent of its workforce — during FY27, with up to 1,500 of those going before the end of 2026. The bank expects a restructuring charge of about $300 million pre-tax in FY27, against roughly $80 million in each of FY25 and FY26. More detail lands with its FY26 results on 5 November.

Most of the coverage has been about the people losing their jobs, and rightly so. But there is a second document inside the same announcement that matters to anyone writing NAB deals, and almost nobody has read it that way. NAB’s release lists its investment priorities as growing business banking, driving deposit growth, and strengthening proprietary home lending. It does not mention the broker channel once.

That is not evidence of a broker retreat. It is, however, a gap in a document that brokers have a legitimate professional interest in — because under ASIC’s best interests duty guidance, a lender’s service levels are a factor you are entitled to weigh and, if you rely on them, expected to substantiate.

What NAB actually said

Taking the bank’s own release rather than the secondary coverage, the operative statements are narrow and worth quoting precisely.

NAB Group CEO Andrew Irvine said the reduction is concentrated in head-office functions: “We are particularly focused on reducing the size of corporate functions.” He also said the bank has “deliberately made deeper changes to senior management positions,” which the release says will broaden leadership responsibilities.

On the customer side, Irvine’s assurance was this: “There will be no material impact to customer-facing banking roles.” And on the rationale: “These changes are expected to improve outcomes for customers by reducing duplication and speeding up decision making.” He added that NAB’s “ambition and strategy remain unchanged.”

The release also says NAB will materially reduce its use of consultants and external contractors, and that consultation with staff and the Finance Sector Union begins now.

Two points of housekeeping on the numbers, because they have been reported inconsistently. NAB’s own release frames the reduction as occurring in FY27; some outlets have described the programme as completing by mid-2027. NAB’s financial year ends in September, so FY27 runs later than mid-year, and the primary release is the better guide. Separately, The Adviser reported that NAB expects a workforce of about 40,000 full-time equivalent staff after the restructure — a figure that appears in that outlet’s reporting rather than in the release itself.

The Finance Sector Union was sharply critical. Its national assistant secretary, Nicole McPherson, told the ABC the union was “appalled,” said cutting 6 per cent of the workforce this close to Christmas was disgraceful, and described NAB’s statement as “full of nothing but corporate spin.”

The line that matters is “corporate” versus “customer-facing”

Irvine’s assurance covers “customer-facing banking roles.” Read it as a broker and the question answers itself: almost nothing you deal with at a major lender is a customer-facing banking role.

Think about who you actually touch on a NAB file. Credit assessors. The broker support line. Pricing. Document processing and verification. Escalation and complaints handling. Your BDM, and whoever your BDM escalates to. Some of those sit in distribution. A good number of them are precisely the kind of back-of-house, head-office function that gets classified as a corporate function in a restructure of this shape.

To be clear about what is and is not known: NAB has not said that broker support, credit assessment or broker distribution functions are affected. Nor has it said they are not. The release draws a line between “corporate functions” and “customer-facing banking roles” and does not tell you which side the functions behind your deals sit on. That is the open question, and 5 November is the next scheduled opportunity to get it answered.

It is also worth holding both halves of Irvine’s statement at once. He said the changes should reduce duplication and speed up decision making. That is the bank’s stated expectation, and removing layers of head-office approval genuinely can shorten a decision chain. The honest position is that a restructure of this size can go either way on service levels in the short run, and that the evidence will show up in your own pipeline before it shows up in anyone’s media release.

Proprietary priority is not new, and NAB has been explicit about the channel

The appearance of “strengthening proprietary home lending” in the priority list is a continuation, not a reveal. NAB has been building its direct mortgage capability for several years and has said so openly.

What the bank has also said, openly, is that this is not framed as a trade-off against brokers. Adam Brown, NAB’s executive for broker distribution, put it this way to Broker Daily in November 2025: “We don’t set a fixed target for how much lending comes through brokers versus directly with our bankers.” He described the priority as “giving customers choice — supporting them in whichever channel works best for them,” called it “striking the right balance, not chasing a hard ratio,” and said the approach “lets us maintain strong partnerships with brokers while continuing to grow our own proprietary lending.”

That same reporting put NAB’s broker share of flows at around 59 per cent for FY25. Whatever else is true, the broker channel still originates the majority of NAB’s home lending. A bank does not casually degrade the service layer underneath six out of every ten of its mortgages. That is the strongest structural reason not to catastrophise this announcement — and it is a reason grounded in NAB’s own commercial interest rather than in reassurance.

Where this lands on your file: RG 273.71 and the substantiation problem

Here is the part that converts a corporate news story into a file-quality issue.

ASIC’s Regulatory Guide 273 sets out its expectations on the best interests duty, which applies to credit assistance under sections 158LA and 158LE of the National Credit Act and has been in force since 1 January 2021. RG 273 is explicit that price is not the whole test. At RG 273.57 it states that “cost is not the only matter relevant to whether recommending a product is in the consumer’s best interests.”

Among the other matters, RG 273.71(b) names “matters that are more difficult to quantify, such as the service levels and policies of the credit provider.” So a lender’s service levels are squarely within the set of things you may properly weigh.

The duty cuts both ways, though. RG 273.77 acknowledges that “some consumers will prioritise approval time and compromise on cost” — and ASIC’s guidance is that claims of this kind need to be evidence-based, with the commentary at its Example 3 expecting brokers to be able to substantiate claims about processing times.

Put those together against a restructure whose service-level consequences are genuinely unknown, and the practical point is sharp. If your recorded reasons on a file say you chose a lender partly for turnaround, that reason needs to rest on evidence that is current. An assumption carried over from a good run six months ago is not evidence. Equally, if you steer a client away from a lender on the strength of a restructure headline, that is a judgement you should be able to support too — and right now the headline supports no conclusion about broker service levels at all.

This is general information, not compliance advice. How your licensee wants turnaround reasoning recorded, and what it accepts as substantiation, is a question for your aggregator’s compliance team or your own compliance adviser.

What to review this week

None of this calls for a change in lender strategy today. It calls for a baseline, so that if something does move you can see it in your own data rather than infer it from a competitor’s complaint in a Facebook group.

1. Pull your own NAB turnaround baseline. Take your last 10 to 20 NAB submissions and record, per file, submission date, date to assessment, date to conditional approval, and the number of information requests. That is your evidence base. It takes under an hour and it is the single most useful thing you can do this week.
2. Timestamp it. Note the date you pulled it and that it pre-dates the restructure programme. A baseline is only useful if you can say what period it covers.
3. Check your standing file language. If your notes or recorded-reasons templates carry a generic line about a lender’s turnaround or service, make sure it reflects something you can actually substantiate for the period of the recommendation, not a sentiment from last year.
4. Identify your time-critical pipeline. Flag any current NAB files with a hard date — auction settlements, finance clauses, bridging, construction progress draws. Those are the deals where a service wobble costs a client money, and they are the ones to watch most closely through the up-to-1,500 reductions landing before the end of 2026.
5. Write the question down for your BDM. Not “are you safe” — that is unkind and unanswerable. Ask instead: are broker support, credit assessment and pricing functions in scope for the corporate-functions reduction, and will escalation paths change? A specific question has a chance of a specific answer.
6. Diarise 5 November. NAB’s FY26 results are the next scheduled disclosure, and the release says more detail on the FY27 cost outlook comes with them. Read them for channel commentary and for anything about distribution or service investment.
7. Benchmark, don’t guess. Industry turnaround surveys such as Broker Pulse give you a cross-lender comparison to sit alongside your own file data. Use current editions — the value is in the trend, and a stale edition is worse than none.

What to watch next

Three things will tell you more than any amount of speculation.

First, the 5 November results and whether NAB says anything about broker distribution alongside its proprietary ambitions. Silence there would be more informative than the silence in the October release, because results day invites the question.

Second, your own escalation experience through November and December, as the first tranche of up to 1,500 roles comes out. Changes in who answers, how long an escalation takes, and whether a familiar name has gone are leading indicators that arrive well before any published metric.

Third, the consultation process with the Finance Sector Union. Consultation is where the actual role-by-role scope gets defined, and it is where the “corporate functions” label gets turned into specifics.

The takeaway

NAB has announced a large reduction, concentrated in head office, and has said customer-facing banking roles are not materially affected. It has named proprietary home lending among its investment priorities and has not mentioned the broker channel in that release. On the bank’s own prior statements, brokers still write the majority of its home loans, and its stated expectation is that decisions get faster, not slower.

What brokers do not have is an answer on the functions behind their files. That is a reasonable thing to ask for, and 5 November is the moment to ask. In the meantime, the defensible position is not a view about NAB — it is a baseline. Brokers who can show what NAB’s turnaround looked like in October will be the ones able to say something evidence-based in February, whichever direction it moves.