National Australia Bank (NAB) has announced it has opened a Community Hub across its four Cairns branches, giving customers direct access to dedicated fraud and financial hardship specialists in one location.
The hub connects customers with NAB's Fraud and Extra Care specialist teams without requiring them to be referred between staff, according to a media release. More than four in five referrals to NAB's specialist support teams in Cairns are linked to scams and fraud, with financial hardship cited as another leading reason customers seek help.
The Cairns launch comes as scam losses continue to rise across Australia. Australians reported more than $2.18 billion in financial losses to scams in 2025, an increase of 7.8% compared with 2024, according to the National Anti-Scam Centre's Targeting Scams Report. The report combines data from Scamwatch, ReportCyber, the Australian Financial Crimes Exchange, IDCARE and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and recorded 481,523 scam reports across those sources for the year. Investment scams, payment redirection scams, romance scams, phishing scams and remote access scams were named as the top scam types by financial losses for the period, with phishing scam losses rising 15.5% year-on-year and payment redirection scam losses up 9.3%.
NAB Group executive Ana Marinkovic said the hub was designed to connect customers with the right people "before a challenge becomes a crisis."
"These challenges often overlap," Marinkovic said.
NAB extra care specialist Nikita Hunita, who is based in Cairns, said local knowledge shapes how the hub operates. "People rarely remember the paperwork or the process," Hunita said. He added that the team's role is to "listen without judgement" and help customers find a way forward.
The Cairns hub is not NAB's first. The bank opened its inaugural Community Hub in Werribee, Victoria, in May, in partnership with the Salvation Army, pairing NAB banking specialists and fraud and scam experts with referral pathways into local community services. That site was selected as the first pilot for the Community Hub concept, intended to inform a broader national rollout.
The Cairns rollout also follows NAB's opening of an integrated financial centre in Chatswood, Sydney, which the bank described as its first to bring home lending, business banking, private and premier banking and fraud support into a single location. That centre forms part of a NAB investment plan exceeding $100 million over two years, targeting upgrades to 170 branches nationwide, of which 120 are in regional communities. NAB Group personal banking executive Marinkovic said at the time the model brought together "all the expertise under one roof."
According to the release, the hub will also run education sessions on scam awareness, money management and financial wellbeing, with the first session scheduled for October. NAB said the Cairns hub forms part of a broader branch investment program, with more than $10 million invested into Queensland branches this year.
