National Australia Bank (NAB) has revealed plans to eliminate up to 2,500 jobs, or roughly 6% of its staff by FY 2027.
About 1,500 of those job losses will occur before the end of the current calendar year. In addition, the lender said it would materially reduce its reliance on consultants and external contractors.
"These changes are expected to improve outcomes for customers by reducing duplication and speeding up decision making," Andrew Irvine, NAB group chief executive officer, said in a statement on Tuesday. "We are particularly focused on reducing the size of corporate functions.
"Our ambition and strategy remain unchanged. We will improve productivity, risk outcomes and execution to be a simpler and more efficient bank," the CEO continued. "These actions will help to make NAB a stronger bank, better placed to navigate risks and opportunities arising from more challenging economic conditions, increasing customer expectations, competitive intensity and rapid technological change."
It is unclear whether the restructure will impact broker roles.
NAB declined to comment further.
However, in his statement, Irvine added: "There will be no material impact to customer-facing banking roles. We have also deliberately made deeper changes to senior management positions, which will broaden leadership responsibilities across the bank. This will simplify work between teams and improve cross-functional processes with clearer roles, priorities and accountabilities for our colleagues."
The restructure is part of the major bank's broader strategy to simplify operations while creating capacity to invest in growth initiatives, such as its proprietary home lending business, business banking and deposit growth, NAB said.
The lender said it expects to incur a $300 million pre-tax restructure charge in FY 2027, related to redundancy, redeployment and organisational redesign costs.
Meanwhile, NAB continues to lean into its proprietary channels. In May, the bank reported that its own proprietary lending channel accounted for 47.7% of home loans during the first half, or the six months ending 31 March. That's up from 41.4% during the six months prior, or 35.3% of all new lending in the back half of 2023. The numbers rose even higher in the month of March, with proprietary flows reaching 50%.
At the same time, Australia's overall home loan market is slowing, thanks to higher interest rates, reduced borrowing capacities, inflationary pressures, the revised budget and general market uncertainty.
NAB's third-quarter trading update in August revealed that total Australian home lending applications fell 15% in the June quarter, compared with the March quarter, while investor activity dropped 17% during the quarter and owner-occupier applications were down 14%.
Furthermore, the bank is forecasting the nation's mortgage market to slow, from 6.7% growth in FY26 to 2.5% in FY27.
NAB's staffing updates come as a number of lenders continue to push their own in-house lending channels, leaving some market players to wonder about the future of mortgage broking in Australia.
In the case of NAB, the major solidified its push for proprietary lending in 2025 by hiring roughly 150 new proprietary home lenders. The move offered a preview of the bank's plans to grow its direct channels while reducing reliance on third-party brokers. The bank said in the autumn it had roughly 270 new bankers in its proprietary lending division.
But industry participants are divided over what NAB's announcement means for the broking industry.
"I think the positives coming out of it are that a lot of bank employees will see the benefits of becoming a broker themselves, working within a brokerage. It'll help bolster the broker channel," Blake Buchanan, general manager at Specialist Finance Group (SFG), told Australian Broker. "But on the negative front, whenever you lose some functions within a bank, it takes time to rearrange. And in that rearrangement period, we will suffer some drops in service, or product, or potentially policy, depending on where the staff come from."
Helen Bird, a law and corporate governance expert and senior lecturer at Swinburne University, said the recent round of layoff will likely result in many jobs being replaced by artificial intelligence. She added that the restructure raises broader questions about what banks stand to lose as they pursue greater efficiency.
"I think when you lose staff and you lose points of contact with staff, of course you lose the human element in any organization," Bird said. "And it's still very important that you have that human connection."
"I think we'll see more of this," she continued. "Particularly if it turns out to be a successful financial effort on the part of the NAB. Then I'm sure they'll be inclined to cut more staff. NAB is not so much an outlier, but an innovator. That means they're a model for the future. But these things are not clear because at this point NAB hasn't told us what they're doing.
"I imagine that there will be efficiency gains," Bird added. "There is no crime in making money. There's no crime in improving your profit. Those things are perfectly understandable. But you have to keep in mind why you make money. In our country, it's because we have four large bank operators operating in an oligopoly with barriers to entry so nobody else can replicate their size. And essentially they have a very important social license, because they are providing an essential service.
Niti Bhargava, founder and principal broker at Melbourne-based brokerage GB Financiials, described NAB's restructuring as "very sad, heartbreaking."
Beyond the potential economic fallout and the prospect of rising unemployment, Bhargava said the restructuring could also create opportunities for the broking industry by increasing total broker market share.
"There will probably be a lot of people emerging as brokers," she said. "Because when people leave banks the top risk choice [for their next role] is becoming a broker."
The broker added that NAB's decision to invest in its proprietary lending channels is two-fold, particularly for its relationship with brokers.
"It does not impact brokers, because brokers work in the best interest of the client," Bhargava explained. "If the client has to be sent to NAB, it has to be sent to NAB at the end of the day.
"But of course, how NAB deals with, or they communicate with the broker channels moving forward, that would be interesting to see as well," she continued. "How they want to accept their clients and how they want to continue working with the brokers moving forward."
However, while the restructuring could create opportunities for the broking industry, Bhargava warned that changes in how banks serve customers also brings into focus the role of personalised financial advice.
"It's really important that clients also listen to their brokers," Bhargava added. "Brokers definitely make a huge difference in the entire client's journey. They work really closely with their chosen brokers and the broker understands what their clients' financial goals are, what they are trying to do in such a critical market moving forward. Clients have to stop asking for these strategies from ChatGPT, or any similar bots, because they're just going to give them whatever is generic, of course, information on the table, which anybody can access by Googling it. Brokers, by contrast, play a really vital part in educating the clients, sitting with them and giving them personalized plans. And that is how banks are going to be very behind. Because until now, it's been very transactional with them because their focus is volume. But brokers' focus is in the best interest of the client. This is where I think more education and more connection with the existing, or the new brokers, is going to be a game-changer moving forward."
NAB will release its FY26 results on 5 November 2026.
