ABA CEO Simon Birmingham transcript of interview on FiveAA with Will Goodings and Stacey Lee

E&OE
Radio Interview
FiveAA Adelaide with Will Goodings and Stacey Lee
27 August 2026.

Topics: How banks are fighting back against scams; Housing market

Will Goodings: All right, let’s talk scams. The CEO of the Australian Banking Association is Simon Birmingham. Birmo, good morning to you.

Simon Birmingham Good morning, Will, g’day, Stacy.

Will Goodings: How big a part of banking is dealing with scams these days?

Simon Birmingham: It’s a huge and continually growing part. Billions of dollars are spent by Australia’s banks trying to prevent scams and prevent fraud. There’s the technology investment, the staff uplift, and all of those things. One of the big examples of that in a cooperative way over the last couple of years is the rollout of what’s called Confirmation of Payee technology. That’s check the name versus the account numbers that many people would have seen when they go to transfer money. It links all the country’s banks together, where you get a green tick or a red cross depending on whether the name you’re putting in matches the account details. That has been used over 150 million times over the last year, and in many occasions, it has been the cause of people stopping, checking and realising that they’ve been given a fake invoice or dodgy account details that are all about sending money off to a scammer somewhere. That’s just one of many different examples of how different tools are being used to try to prevent scams.

Stacey Lee: Can we keep up quick enough? It feels like scammers are getting very, very clever in the way they deal with people and taking their money.

Simon Birmingham: It’s absolutely a war out there, Stacy. No doubt about that. Scammers are not just what we think of in a historic sense, some dodgy old bloke trying to scam you out of a few bucks. These are now often global, multinational crime syndicates that run scam factories in countries that don’t clamp down on this and then target wealthier countries like Australia.

That’s why the big investment in using AI to fight back against AI is important. One of the examples from one of the major banks is that they have AI chatbots where they basically seed those phone numbers to those chatbots out into the marketplace, and they actually keep scammers on phone calls talking to a chatbot, sometimes for close to an hour. It’s so realistic when you listen to them.

Elsewhere, similar AI tools are actually used to listen in on a human-to-human conversation with a bank. You talk to the scam centre at the bank, but there’s an AI tool listening in the background to pick up keywords and give the bank staff member prompts to say “This person has just mentioned something around crypto. You should go and ask these types of questions,” because a lot of our scam losses are money sent off into crypto, from which it’s next to impossible for banks to recover it or get it back for the customer.

Will Goodings: That’s fascinating. I saw the Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, yesterday having a press conference with regard to our Five Eyes partners. They were talking about the way in which new technology that’s used against governments is actually also a tool for governments to root this kind of thing out, which is exactly what you’re saying about the use of AI in trying to fight back against scammers.

I want to ask you about something else, too, Simon. That’s a big talking point with regard to the banks and how healthy they are at the moment, and it goes to the loan component of the business in an environment where housing prices are seeing a correction. The Federal government moved post-budget to disincentivise investment in the housing sector. It’s a big part of the banks’ business model is people taking out loans and paying back mortgages. What’s the sense within your industry about whether this is currently a blip, an adjustment or indeed if there are going to have to be some major changes to the way the banks operate to remain at their current level of profitability?

Simon Birmingham: Well, we’ve just come through reporting season, and the major banks have outlined what indeed have been significant changes in the last few months around loan applications. Some of that is driven by budget and tax changes, and some of it is driven by the interest rate and broader economic environment. The government’s policy is clearly to see fewer investor loans in existing housing stock, so everybody would expect that to continue, the numbers and rates of those loans not to be as high as they were in the past, because that is what the tax changes are designed to alter.

In terms of home ownership, obviously, the policy is intended to tilt the balance in favour of first home buyers. The banks have reported some downturn in initial applications there, too. That clearly shows people responding to the range of market conditions, be it higher interest rates or concerns about where prices will go, but most are reporting or predicting some degree of stabilisation there. Of course, the government would also highlight that they wanting that investor loan stock to shift over time into more new housing development. There are some signs of a little bit of that occurring, but it’s pretty early days in terms of how the investor market might change over the long term in relation to those tax changes.

Will Goodings: All right, good stuff. Simon, good to chat. Thanks for your time.

Simon Birmingham: Thanks, guys. My pleasure.

Ends