NAB to compensate small businesses after weekend’s nationwide outage

The National Australia Bank has pledged to “absolutely” repay small businesses that were affected by a nationwide outage on Saturday, which took down EFTPOS terminals. ATMs and internet banking facilities.

The outage commenced shortly before 8am on Saturday morning and was rectified by around 1.30pm. But it was long enough for scores of small businesses to lose out on sales during a usually busy trading period.

Plenty of business owners took to social media to vent their frustration with the outage. One Twitter user told NAB the bank was “killing” his business, while another said they had just “saw $2500 walk out the door”. Another suggested NAB should waive all merchant fees for a month to make up for the disruption.

The incident has been blamed on a “power issue” in Melbourne, and Cindy Batchelor, executive general manager of NAB Business, said on Saturday it wasn’t yet clear how many individuals and businesses had been affected.

She apologised for the outage and said NAB will “absolutely” provide full compensation to businesses that lost sales because of the outage.

“If there was a loss this morning driven by the outage today, yes compensation will be provided to customers,” she said during a press conference on Saturday.

“We’ll work with each and every one of them to understand exactly what happened to that particular customer.”

However, it appears the onus will be on small business operators to contact the bank to discuss compensation.

“Every customer has the opportunity to come and talk to us about the impact they’ve had specifically on their business,” she said.

“And our intention is work with each and every one of them to make sure they have no financial loss associated with the outage today.”

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