NAB's tech transformation continues amid solid results

As the company today announced "solid" half-year profits of AU$2.52 billion, National Australia Bank CEO Cameron Clyne told investors that the company's 10-year technology transformation program is already delivering benefits to the bank.

NAB is currently four years into its 10-year IT transformation journey to overhaul its back-end infrastructure and front-end functions. According to a recent presentation on the program (PDF), the company, with Dimension Data and Telstra, has already completed overhauling its 9 phone systems with one web-based virtualised system, and has reduced 8 bespoke networks down to one Australia-wide multi-protocol layer service network.

The company is in the process of implementing its seven-year outsourcing agreement with IBM that it signed in 2010, to go from its own mainframe and server infrastructure to a private cloud. NAB was scheduled to migrate applications into the cloud by the end of 2015. NAB's results today stated that the private cloud core infrastructure had now been built.

The company's new datacentre has also been built. The migration of applications from the secondary datacentre to the new datacentre is set to be complete by the end of 2014.

NAB has entered a 10-year licencing agreement with Oracle for the company's new banking platform, which launched in September 2012.

In Thursday's results, Clyne said that the Oracle Credit Risk Engine has been built, and was now being deployed within the bank.

Personal customers will begin using the new platform in 2014, while business customers will begin using the new platform in 2016, when NAB will begin decommissioning any remaining legacy systems.

The company also began rolling out 130,000 new merchant acquiring terminals and a number of apps for customers, including MoneyTracker and PeopleLikeU.

The overall aim of the project is to reduce costs and improve productivity. On Thursday, Clyne said it was already heading in this direction.

"Our ongoing technology transformation has allowed us to organise our business to better service customers, and to better respond to market developments, particularly those driven by digitisation," he said.

"These initiatives will further enhance the customer experience, achieve productivity gains, and lower costs across the Australian franchise."