According to a statement, NAB is reviewing client Beneficiary Nomination Forms to ensure they have been completed correctly.
In late 2016, during a regular compliance review, one adviser and his support staff were found to have incorrectly witnessed Beneficiary Nomination Forms for clients, NAB said.
The clients had signed the form with only one witness present, and a second person signed as a witness without being present. Subsequent investigations found that this had occurred in other instances, the statement said.
“While there is no evidence of ill-intent, and advisers gain no personal benefit, this practice is clearly wrong and is not acceptable,” said NAB Financial Planning general manager Tim Steele.
“We are not aware of any clients being impacted by this. We will work with trustees to determine whether any clients may need to re-sign these forms.”
NAB added it has notified ASIC about the matter and will continue to engage with the regulator about its findings.
“While advisers and staff may have been seeking to make things easier for clients, it is clearly wrong, and we are taking this matter very seriously,” Mr Steele said.
“As NAB has always said, where we find issues, we will investigate them, we will fix them and we will improve our systems and processes to prevent them from re-occurring.”
As part of the review, NAB said it has asked staff to report any instances when this may have happened, and advisers will have non-compliance consequences applied.
Those who do not self-report, and are later found to have not followed the correct processes, will face a review of their employment, NAB said.
“We are taking a thorough and methodical approach to this review, we have addressed this issue with our staff, and we have strengthened our existing auditing processes to ensure staff understand and adhere to the correct process moving forward,” Mr Steele said.
banks really need to go back to being banks and not financial planning leave this to those experts who actually do the right thing by their clients
There are some cynics here suggesting that NAB have only self reported to distract the regulator from their real wrongdoing. Personally, I say ‘well done NAB’, because I know this issue has occurred in another big bank’s FP arm and they appear to have kept it under wraps. Which bank you ask?
Oh dear another “I’m really sorry, we have done wrong by our customers and me being the CEO did not have a clue this was going on”, scandal coming up………….
Yeah – funny reading the comments of the ignorant – uninformed people who don’t seem to understand that ASIC make all the rules, Admin were the ones who missed the mistakes; probably passing 2 quality checks and the clients were the lazy ones who did not follow simple instructions or could not be bothered taking a few minutes to do things properly
And anyway – NAB would lose a battle in court as they had passed these as correct – they correcting these now so they don’t lose any future battles in court – I work for an Insurance/super company and have seen several case we have had to pay out – even though forms were incorrectly filled out and false information given and quite clearly the client had lied through their teeth – there are faults on both sides – you can come up an example and I will come back with more of deception, lies and fraud that is never reported by the media – why do you think fees are so high – its funny how those cases are never pointed out to the general public
Dav you raised some good points are you saying that if a form is incorrectly filled out by either a client or some one else, the company taking the information could be held liable? This would suggest the onus is on the company to be very careful in checking paperwork when received. Would you agree?
Why is it so difficult to get this stuff right??
This is got to be some sort of cover up. No doubt trying to distract the regulator from the next big blow up. Here we’ve got NAB, a history of sales and shonky ongoings, all the way to the top of the sales tree and now there coming out with this rubbish to claim there doing better. I wonder how many other Accountants and advisers would witness a client sign a binding death nomination or other forms behind closed doors and then get the secretary (who perhaps saw them arrive and go) to also witness the form. Accountants, Solicitors and Bank Managers have been doing this for decades. Really, what is the logic of having two witnesses anyway? Has a large organisation like the banks or AMP ever come out and say the amount of paperwork is just over the top.
absolutely, note how they do not need to compensate, so they will just report issues where there is no compensation required I think Greg below has raised an interesting issue where by compensation was required but have not exposed this issue and will continue to cover this up
Small steps. Self reporting in a large organisation needs to be treated like whistle blowing so the planners can be comfortable that any reporting will not put a black mark against them forever – depending on severity of course. But you are right that if an incident is systemic, which it looks like this issue is, NAB conducts some open and honest investigation into their processes, procedures and training because it’s likely that this what has allowed this to happen.
The challenge for Tim, and people in similar positions, is going to be fighting through the internal protection culture that all large corporates have. At least he’s new to NAB so can “kick a few butts”. Internals have to start to accept accountability for any shortcomings or mistakes and not use advisers as scapegoats. There is a very strong argument to change management in critical areas every few years so that “mateship” doesn’t over-rule management. This is not just a threat for NAB but all of our large corporates where they have tended to recruit friends and non threats rather than people who will constructively challenge without fear or favour – just look at the number of usual suspects that rotate through the industry.
So the Planners need to self report and as a consequence they will have their incentives impacted. This is probably the right thing to do, but that impact should be felt all the way up the line. Planners should not be the only people who feel this financial impact. If you are a Manager – manage!
Do not take this threat by the NAB seriously folks,They just rejected a clients claims of compensation when their trust allowed switching forms to go through the system without client signatures.Nobody has been sent home.