Carrington Clarke

The National Australia Bank seems to have disappointed with its results and warns about the state of the economy.

Meanwhile, there's a mixed report card from this week's auctions.

Just how fragile is the property market right now?

Welcome to ABC Business Daily.

I'm Carrington Clarke.

Steph, happy RBA decision eve.

Let's maybe start with this result from National Australia Bank.

This is their half yearly result.

It is one of Australia's most important companies.

It obviously means a lot to people if they've got shares in the company, which almost everyone does through their superannuation anyway, but also about what it tells us about the state of the Australian economy right now.

What did you make of the results and why do you think we have seen a sell-off in the company today?

Yeah, well, let's talk about that because it is more interesting than perhaps people might think at first blush.

So this is them taking what appears to be a loss on the cost of the software, but it's more complicated than that, isn't it?

And it's more about how quickly technology is currently changing and what it means for the costs of these businesses.

Yeah, and I think there are a couple of interesting things going on with this that could be important for other companies and for, say, the economy.

I think one thing to note is the big Australian banks are probably the first movers or close to the first movers here in Australia, at least, because they've got...

huge bank balances that allow them to actually spend the money on changing their processes to utilize artificial intelligence.

And we know this is a major focus of the big banks that they're trying to really embed artificial intelligence into all parts of their business because they think it's going to help them make more money, make their processes more efficient and therefore help their bottom line and their profit.

So that's going to be – they're kind of probably going to be ahead pretty far up the queue when it comes to this transformation.

But I think you're also right.