Australia’s NAB to test AI agent safeguards – report
Vidhya Edwards Munnangi
Wed, August 5, 2026 at 2:47 PM GMT+3 2 min read
National Australia Bank (NAB) is preparing to test the security and operational controls of an agentic AI platform, as major Australian lenders work towards broader use of the technology, reported Bloomberg.
The bank's plan to allow AI agents to deal with staff and internal systems on behalf of customers is raising questions about the limits of those tools and the tasks they should be allowed to perform, said Patrick Wright, group executive for technology and enterprise operations.
In an interview, Wright said: "Customers will expect one day to interact with us through agents," adding that the bank is looking to do pilots and experiments over the next year.
This is the first time NAB has publicly set out this approach.
The Melbourne-based bank is applying agentic AI to some internal work, including support for its operations team on more complicated tasks, Wright said.
The planned testing is intended to address the risk of unexpected mistakes. Wright said "security is the thing I think about," and "we've got to do it in a way that's safe,".
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) also partnered with OpenAI last year to explore cutting edge generative AI-enabled banking services.
A separate Australian Financial Review report said that thousands of Westpac bankers are using bots to review mortgage and credit card applications, as the lender seeks to show returns from increased AI spending and reduce the distance with Commonwealth Bank.
Westpac said the AI agents saved 12,500 banker hours in the first month of operation in July, annualised at 150,000 hours.
At an event hosted by Amazon Web Services in Sydney, McMullan said Westpac's mortgage and consumer lending bankers were using a multi-agent system, built using AWS's Bedrock AgentCore system, as the US cloud group expanded its role in financial services.
The agents are handling more than 1.5 million transactions and more than 32,000 payslips each week.
The bank is planning a wider rollout of agents.
It has reportedly already reduced the time needed to build a new agent from six months last year to six weeks and was targeting a real-time system that would allow staff to deploy agents for different tasks.
"For our people, verifying income can be really complex, time-consuming and full of policy judgment. So our specialist agents work together around the banker," said McMullan.
"Australia's NAB to test AI agent safeguards – report" was originally created and published by Retail Banker International, a GlobalData owned brand.
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