Building the IT shop of the future: under the hood of NAB’s transformation
A year in to its digital transformation, NAB’s made solid progress but there’s still more to do.
Flexibility, speed, resilience and control: our end game at NAB is building an IT shop with these as its hallmarks. We see this as paramount if we are serious about delivering exceptional customer services.
It’s an exciting time as our industry and organisation goes through a massive technology-led transformation.
Changing customer behaviour is driving business transformation, influenced by digital, cloud, machine learning, artificial intelligence and data that are changing all aspects of our lives and business.
These factors are influencing every aspect of our industry, from our frontline bankers through to our product design. They’re changing how we work, how we engage with our customers, how we make decisions and how we manage risks.
In our business, we’re making big changes. Out with the old and in with the new. We must change to use modern technology systems and architecture that support the business NAB wants to be — a bank that places the customer at the heart of every product, process and decision. We must give our bankers the right tools to succeed.
Like other major financial institutions and big business in Australia and around the world, NAB’s ICT (Information and Communication Technology) infrastructure has evolved and adapted over 160 years of consumer, business and regulatory change. As a result, it includes best-of-breed software from third-party vendors and custom-developed applications that were inherited, after the acquisition of the businesses that commissioned them.
This complex array of systems served us well enough in the past. Australia’s banks have long been known for the stability and security of their core systems and the stringent cyber-safety regimes that make large outages and data breaches, thankfully, rare.
But our old solutions are no longer fit for purpose in our ultra-connected world. In less than a decade, the consumer and business landscapes have been transformed by the democratisation of technology, the rise of social media and a customer expectation that businesses will launch and improve products and services that deliver what they expect, when they want it and in the channel they prefer.
It’s what I love about what we’re doing at NAB. It’s not about being digital, it’s about what we deliver for our customers.
A new direction
As more enterprises use data analytics to drive new opportunities — and embrace efficiently priced cloud infrastructure to leverage that quickly — the pace of change will step up even further.
Digital native companies — the Amazons, the Airbnbs, the Apples — were born ready to respond. They were born in the age of technology and have the capability to sprint out of the gate, entering new markets in hours and days, not the weeks and months traditional businesses need to plan, test and carry out before delivery.
Keeping up, using existing technology architecture, may have been possible for a little longer, in theory at least. But it would have been prohibitively expensive, relentlessly hard work and we’d have been late to most parties for our customers.
We recognised this needed to change. We must change.
In September 2017, NAB embarked on a three-year, $4.5 billion investment to turn itself into a company with the infrastructure and expertise to anticipate and respond to customer needs and launch new services swiftly, safely and economically.
Our team is replacing legacy architecture with modular, component-based applications that allow the flexibility we need to pivot quickly, as necessary.
We’re doing the vast majority of work in-house because we believe the infrastructure we develop will be pivotal to NAB’s survival and success as a business — it’s far too important to outsource to third parties, regardless of their credentials.
The new way forward
To help us do all of this, we know we need great people. Some of these people will come to NAB from outside our organisation as we transition, but we know we must also invest in our people, in their development and in their growth.
Last year we brought in about 600 specialists with expertise in cloud technology, data science and coding, to help us get to where we need to be.
We did that while also investing in our employees to ensure they have the right skills and tools to help us become the customer-centric enterprise we’re striving for. We trained more than 3,000 of our people in cloud technology in just six months and AWS-certified more than 350, and we’ve only just started.
Having the right people with the right skills and tools is playing a big role in helping us move more quickly.
In 2017, we had 12 applications running in the cloud, including QuickBiz, an unsecured lending platform for small businesses, which took just 14 weeks to develop.
This year there are around 100 and 2019 will see us add hundreds more. By the close of 2020, we expect to have migrated around 35% or more of our 2,500 applications
In June 2018 we launched a public cloud-based data lake, which will serve as the foundation for an array of data analytics projects across the bank, where we’ll expand our machine learning capabilities.
We’re galloping ahead, and we want to speed up in years two and three.
There have been, and will continue to be, challenges aplenty as we unpick the past, but building the future couldn’t be more exciting.
We’re hiring! If you’re interested in working in technology at NAB, visit our website here.
About the author: Patrick Wright is the Chief Technology and Operations Officer at NAB. Prior to NAB, Patrick has worked at companies including Barclays and JP Morgan Chase.
