NAB cuts 2,500 jobs while perfecting the art of corporate euphemism

National Australia Bank announced on Tuesday that it will eliminate 2,500 positions—roughly 6 percent of its 42,000-person workforce—as part of what management calls a "major restructure." Up to 1,500 of those cuts will land before the end of 2026. The bank expects to take a pre-tax restructuring charge of approximately $300 million in FY27, a four-fold increase from the $80 million it recorded in each of the previous two years. NAB shares fell 2.7 percent to $38.82 on the announcement. In the language of corporate communications, none of this is technically wrong. But it is masterfully obscured.

CEO Andrew Irvine framed the cuts with the kind of vocabulary that has become standard operating procedure in financial services: "We will improve productivity, risk outcomes and execution to be a simpler and more efficient bank. These changes are expected to improve outcomes for customers by reducing duplication and speeding up decision making." Nowhere in that statement does he mention the 2,500 people who will lose their jobs. Nowhere does he acknowledge that "simplification" means redundancy, that "efficiency" often means consolidation of roles, that "reducing duplication" translates to eliminating entire departments. This is the corporate equivalent of describing a car accident as an "unplanned lateral relocation."

The restructure will target corporate functions and senior management, with strategy, transformation, project management, back-office, compliance, risk and business services in scope. NAB also plans to "materially reduce its use of consultants and external contractors," a line that deserves its own meditation. The bank has been spending lavishly on external expertise—money that could theoretically have paid the salaries of the 2,500 people it now intends to remove. Instead, NAB chose to rely on contractors and consultants, and now it is choosing to cut permanent staff. The efficiency gain, it seems, runs only one direction.

The Financial Services Union, unsurprisingly, rejected the bank's framing. "The FSU is appalled by today's announcement that NAB will be slashing 2,500 jobs across the bank by mid-2027, including a mammoth 1,500 cuts by Christmas this year," a union spokesperson said. Appalled, slashing, mammoth. The language here reflects what the language from Irvine obscures: the concrete reality that thousands of people will no longer have paycheques, no longer have health insurance tied to employment, no longer have the identity that often comes with a role at a major bank.

This is not unique to NAB. Earlier this year, ANZ announced 3,500 job cuts. Financial institutions across the sector have been announcing redundancies with increasing regularity, and they have learned to speak about it in a particular dialect—one that makes the cuts sound inevitable, necessary, even beneficial. They talk about "structural change" and "strategic repositioning" and "simplification," words that flatten the individual human experience into abstraction.

AI sits in the background of these announcements, rarely mentioned explicitly by the banks themselves, but impossible to ignore. Financial institutions are investing heavily in technology and automation. Some of the roles being eliminated are genuinely redundant in the way that certain technologies have become obsolete. But banks have also learned, through hard experience with public and political backlash, not to say this directly. Better to invoke productivity and efficiency and customer outcomes, and let the market understand what is actually happening.

What is actually happening is that 2,500 people will be told, sometime between now and mid-2027, that their positions no longer exist in the bank's simplified, more efficient operating model. They will attend meetings where HR representatives will use words like "transition" and "support" and "severance package." They will begin the work of finding new jobs in a labour market that is itself turbulent. Some will manage it quickly. Others will struggle. All of them will experience this as the loss it is, no matter what terminology their former employer chooses to deploy.

The real scandal is not that NAB is cutting 2,500 jobs. Corporations make these decisions constantly. The scandal is that the language has become so divorced from reality that a bank can announce it is eliminating 6 percent of its workforce and frame it as an improvement in customer outcomes. The scandal is that we have collectively agreed to accept this translation, to nod along while restructures are announced and simplifications are implemented and efficiency gains are realized, as though the human cost has been abstracted away entirely. It hasn't. It's just been renamed.