Our Approach

Our approach to corporate responsibility ensures that our beliefs and behaviours are embedded in our everyday decision making and our longer-term planning for the future. It focuses us on:

• Getting the fundamentals right with our customers - by delivering fair value and quality advice
• Being a good employer - through investing in the skills and capabilities of our employees, and
• Addressing our broader responsibility to society - by supporting communities, managing our environmental impact and having a positive impact through our supply chain

“Our sustainability and success relies on the continued goodwill of a whole range of stakeholders. Without doubt, the worst outcome for shareholders would be an industry that doesn’t pay attention to its customers and stakeholders. We take our responsibility to all stakeholders seriously.” Cameron Clyne, CEO

We believe that managing our business in a responsible manner is the right thing to do by all our stakeholders and makes good business sense. Being a responsible business enhances and protects our reputation, one of our four strategic priorities. It helps us to attract and retain high quality employees, manage risk, identify new opportunities in emerging markets and build deeper and stronger stakeholder relations.

How We Work

We deliver our corporate responsibility approach through:

• Engaging with our stakeholders to inform us of current and emerging issues, challenge us to develop mutually beneficial solutions and help us define our strategic direction;
• Developing a corporate responsibility strategy that sets clear objectives, establishes appropriate policies, procedures and activities and includes measuring and reporting on our progress; and
• Installing governance structures and internal communication that ensure corporate responsibility is understood by our leaders and our people, and results in balanced decision making.

Key Issues

We have engaged with both internal and external stakeholders to map the corporate responsibility issues most relevant to our business. The map is designed to assist our stakeholders understand NAB's corporate responsibility coverage and approach.

We recognise the importance of managing each of these issues, and you can find out more about what we do in relation to each in the relevant sections of this website.

In 2011 we have engaged with our stakeholders and global business to understand the relative importance of these issues to help us focus our corporate responsibility reporting and develop our future strategy. Our approach to this process was guided by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines, as well as the AA1000 AccountAbility Principles Standard (AA1000APS).

This process involved engaging with our stakeholders to determine the issues of most interest to them. In addition, we assessed each of the issues to identify those of most importance to our business. The outcome of this process identified the following issues as high interest to our stakeholders and importance to our business.

Our assessment is a useful touch point to guide our reporting and strategy. As noted above, we believe that we have responsibilities across the full range of issues and will continue to work to improve in all areas. We primarily use the map to guide the balance of issues discussed in our annual report, the indicators selected for our reporting and to input into our future strategy.

Creating Value

We recognise that operating in a responsible manner is not just about doing the right thing. It's also about taking a sustainable approach to the creation of long-term business value. For us there are five key benefits we derive from being a responsible business:

Stakeholder Engagement

Connecting with our many and varied stakeholders is a vital aspect of our operations. Maintaining an open and constructive dialogue with our stakeholders helps us understand expectations. It is a value creating activity. It contributes to risk management, learning and innovation. It also helps us to identify emerging issues and opportunities for creating new products and services and improving our performance.

“In this uncertain climate, good business leadership needs to make more of an effort to understand what's happening in the marketplace”. Cameron Clyne - Group CEO

As a large global business we interact with a diverse range of stakeholders. The table below illustrates our key stakeholders, provides an overview of the types of engagement we undertake and identifies the corporate responsibility issues from our map of most interest.

Contact Us

We value the opportunity to engage with our stakeholders. To start a conversation, please feel free to contact us at corporate.responsibility@nab.com.au.