Lawoko lands key National Australia Bank CRM role

Dr Charles Lawoko, who had held the title of head of customer relationship management at the NAB, confirmed today he had been appointed in late December as head of cross-marketing and customer relationship management for the Australian region.

Dr Lawoko's previous role, while also limited to Australia, had also been restricted to the retail bank. His new role will expand into the wealth management area as the NAB shifts to a regional business structure comprising units servicing Australia, Europe and New Zealand. The regional units encompass wealth management, the retail bank brands and the transactional and custodial operations of the former corporate and institutional banking division. The wealth management business, which operated under the MLC brand, is being integrated into the regional structure.

Dr Lawoko said in his new role, he was managing a team comprising staff from the retail bank and the wealth management arm.

While Dr Lawoko declined to comment on the exact number of people in the team, he said the wealth management arm had previously run a small customer insight unit that did not undertake analysis to the level of sophistication as did the retail bank's customer relationship management team.

He reports to the NAB's general manager of marketing, whose responsibility encompasses the Australian region.

Dr Lawoko declined to provide specific details as to the projects the team had in the pipeline for the coming year.

However, he cited the business drivers behind customer relationship management projects as being "the use of customer information to improve the way customers were managed by the bank and increasing both the cross-sell rate and share of wallet of the customer".

The NAB operates a healthy suite of customer relationship management systems, including a Teradata warehouse and relationship optimisation tool on top of a Teradata database.

The NAB has been undergoing a massive restructure to change its systems and culture since it lost AU$360 million in a foreign exchange trading scandal in January 2003. NAB chairman Graham Kraehe this week apologised to shareholders for the bank's trading performance for the year ended September 2004, saying it reflected flat revenue, unsustainable cost growth, a complex and costly business structure and poor compliance processes.