NAB brings in payment prompts

NAB has introduced real-time payment prompts that will induce customers to consider if they wish to proceed with money transfers, in an to squash scam and mistaken payments.

The bank has added prompts to its NAB app and internet banking to assist customers to spot potential scams and ensure money is transferred to the right account.

The prompts will appear to customers as instant and tailored messages, depending on the type of transaction they’re making.

The announcement follows moves by Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to verify transactions and payment details, also in the name of preventing fraudulent or mistaken money transfers.  

NAB's chief digital officer Sujeet Rana told iTnews that “a lot of what CBA and Westpac have done is name matching.”

“When you type in a payee for the first time, it name matches [the name] against other [account attributes]," he said.

“We have that in place already with PayID. Why this is different, is it's actually personalised down to the individual, so when you put in a payee for the first time, we actually make a real-time call to our fraud engine, that we've been building this fraud engine at NAB now for over 10 years.

“It's got tens of thousands of rules in it and it's risk-based so it's not static. It actually adapts to all of the inputs that are happening across the market.”

Rana said if the planned payment is flagged as being out-of-place based on a person’s past transitional history, the NAB customer will be sent a tailored prompt asking them to rethink if they wish to proceed, followed by information detailing common scams.

“It's just an extra step to help our customers consider different things that they may not [have], before they actually go through and make that payment," Rana said.

He added that since the customer prompts are personalised, people are less likely to ignore them as “background noise”.

Rana said when a user adds a payee during the transaction process, a real-time API call is made in the backend to NAB's fraud engine, which will calculate a risk score and match based on the payee's past behaviour.

The prompts differ from past messaging NAB made to customers flagging potential scams because it is "personalised, individualised and real-time”.

“We want to start making sure that we move towards things in real-time so that we can catch things as they happen or prior to them actually happening, and then really starting to lend ourselves into that education piece, which is something that we are becoming much more focused on into the future," Rana said.

The prompts go live for a small subset of customers today, before ramping up to a wider audience “within a couple of days”.  

“The other really good part about this is we're actually doing it from an omnichannel perspective," Rana said.

“It launches on internet banking and our app at the exact same time, so there's benefits across both immediately for our customers because we do know that different demographics use different channels.

“We want to make sure that we're there for our customers across that spectrum [of channels]."

Rana added the most common type of scams seen at the bank is romance scams, business intercepts ploys and investment scams which commonly involve cryptocurrency.  

The new payment prompts function is one 64 fraud and scam-related projects underway at NAB, aimed at helping to address the rise in scams targeting Australians.

Rana said these initiatives are a mix of technology projects and education programs, which all ties into the “seriousness” of the scam situation which “is a real pain point” for its customers.

The bank has also added more than 70 people to its fraud and scams team since October last year, particularly in the areas of financial crime and technology.

'Team Australia' approach

Rana said that tackling scams required a “Team Australia approach”, comprising of governments, telcos and financial institutions working together.

“It's making sure that it's beyond just banks because telcos have a part to play in this, government has a part to play in this," Rana said.

“We already talk with many of our competitors and governments in the right forums about how can we work better [and] how can we make sure that if we know known fraudsters and scammers, we [have ways to] share that information, so that everyone's got it."

“The more we can take a team Australia approach to this the better it's going to be for our customers," he added.