The National NAB moving in the right direction

Tags: bank, Blog, nab, national, savings

One thing I have been meaning to talk about of late is the approach the NAB (2nd recent rename of National Australia Bank) has been taking towards their fees and different account options in the past few months. And before you start to think that this is some rant about how ‘the bank is trying to rip off people’ it isn’t, it’s applauding the new accounts and structure the NAB is taking.

My history with NAB
First of all my history with NAB goes back a long way, infact before my birth as my father has been involved with the bank (mainly as bank manager) most of his life. I spent my life generally surrounded by NAB related things such as the work car, living in house attached to bank for a while and all of the cool free NAB stuff we got like NAB matches and flexible NAB rulers way before you could buy them!

My first grudge with NAB
So of course my personal bank accounts are all under NAB and around 5 years ago I took up Internet banking with them. My first issue against the bank first came from when I started using Mozilla Firefox as my main browser around 2 years ago and the Internet Banking would not allow it to work. So each time I had to fire up trusty old Internet Explorer to use my Internet Banking.

Starting to make changes for the better
After a couple of month I came to notice Internet Banking working with Firefox, and it has every since pointing to the fact that the bank is developing for more then just Internet Explorer, which for the non tech savvy out there means developing for multiple browsers which increase development time considerably.

The new account options start to roll out
I was first informed about the new NAB product by my mum who still works with the bank around the start of 2006. The product is a free add on to any personal account and is called the iSaver account. The iSaver account works as a normal savings account that gets some good interest (6.10% at the moment) on the money you have in there. All seems normal until you see the way it all works.

You need to have Internet Banking enabled and all you do is transfer any money anytime from your normal day to day account to your iSaver account (no fee) and interest is calculated daily on the amount in the account at the end of the day and paid at the end of the month. You can put money in there anytime and withdraw anytime with no fees associated and no loss of interest earned - which does occur on other savings accounts such as Heritage where the money has to be in there for one month minimum with no withdrawls to get interest.

The only catch is you cant attach an atm card or withdraw money direct straight from the account, but all you do to access it is login to Internet Banking and transfer it for free to your normal account, easy as!

I really sound like Im trying to sell the product here but in all honesty it is really that good that Im happy to give credit to it where due as for younger people like myself a savings account like this is a godsend that you can easily put money to and back from using Internet Banking.

The image changes
In the past two years NAB has made two major changes their logo (shown on right). The first change was the change of name mainly from ‘National Australia Bank’ to ‘National’. This change helped re-inforce their domain name of national.com.au and also gave the logo a bit more modern look with less bulk.

The next change occured around the end of 2006 which was a dramatic change from calling themselves National to just NAB (pronounced nab as in cab) and to be shown in lowercase. The logo wording obviously changed to reflect this along with a ‘modernisation’ applied to the star in the logo which has made the end logo look great in my opinion and almost having that ‘Web 2.0 Logo’ feel.

NAB has also just recently announced that shortly their website address will default to nab.com.au instead of national.com.au

The final nail on the sucess sign
Just recently NAB has released a new pricing structure for their personal and also business accounts. The pricing structure is inline with the way I believe people are willing to pay as they now offer a flat fee structure.

For personal they offer for only $5 a month a transaction account with unlimited transactions with no fees done by NAB ATM, EFTPOS, Internet/Phone Banking along with including the above iSaver account. It shows that the bank is really listening to consumer demand as people now start to question why are they paying so much in fees for stuff the bank doesn’t really incur a fee on.

The good news for business people is that they have done this with Business accounts as well and we are looking at changing to NAB because under our Company structure we’re setting up we need a new bank account to our old Westpac one.

Final Words
I must commend NAB on their who business restructure in both pricing and image and say that I am very happy to have stuck with NAB my whole life and these kind of changes will defiantly retain customers like myself.