Steph Chalmers

So in order for the software to be considered an asset, that they'll use this accounting treatment on there, set the threshold higher.

So I thought that was quite interesting that that's something we're probably going to see a lot of companies grappling with how they valued things

that are now becoming superseded even more fast?

And how do they actually deal with that going forward?

So we could see that as a bit of a theme in the main company reporting season, perhaps that companies are trying to grapple with, hey, AI is moving super fast.

Is this stuff we've predicted is going to be an asset to us actually no longer that relevant?

Our understanding looking into this was that the banks didn't have access in that first round of testing that Anthropic was talking about, giving the US firms kind of limited access to prepare their own defences.

So it is a worry because, as you say, the reason why

these big banks are seen as somewhat of a bellwether for Australia's corporate sector more largely is they have so many customers, so many employees.

They really, in such a concentrated market with the four majors really dominating, they represent so much of our economy.

But then, as you say, that means they represent such a large risk as well if there's any vulnerabilities there.

So you have to think that

This is part of this changing how they're dealing with software is to, you know, have the ability to move more quickly, put up their defenses and invest in defending against these new potential threats, because I think it's such a systemic risk as well to the Australian economy.

As we say, NAB is the major business bank, so they would have many corporate customers and we've seen just even the impact of disruptions, less nefarious disruptions, you know, an outage or something has caused all major banks to have issues over the past few years with not being able to make payments at supermarkets and it really can grind the whole economy to a standstill for a few hours if you're coming in with a threat

nefarious threat perhaps from an actor using this technology in the wrong way, it could be catastrophic for the banks and Australian households and businesses.

And I think as well, they'll be working together rather than, you know, purely being competitors.

Obviously the banks are very competitive with each other, but given we do have a relatively concentrated financial market, I was talking to the chief risk officer of CBA and some of the other bank head of investigations about the risk in terms of illicit tobacco and money laundering and that sort of thing.

And on that front, they were really talking about this is somewhere where there's no competition involved.

In terms of dealing with bad actors, it's all about what data can we share with each other?

What tricks and tools can we share, not only with the big four banks, but also down to their smaller peers to try and prevent perhaps a loophole where there's a smaller bank that's more vulnerable because a lot of Australians will be banking with more than one bank and they might have an account with a smaller bank, but then also be a customer of a major bank.