Speaking at the bank’s third quarter financial update today the bank’s chief executive officer Cameron Clyne said that although the bank was feeling the effects of “difficult” market conditions and was attempting to control efficiency and productivity - it has reduced costs by 3 per cent over the last two years - it was not constraining investment and continued to invest in new technologies.
NAB identified the need to deal with legacy issues in 2009, and has been steadily progressing its technology transformation, which includes a significant investment in cloud computing.
In its announcement to the ASX today NAB stated that; “The group remains focussed on balancing investment in core infrastructure projects with sustainable productivity improvements,”
As evidence of the continuing technology transformation Mr Clyne pointed to the recent roll out of NAB’s virtual call centre, which he claimed was the largest of its type in Australia. NAB worked with Telstra to consolidate nine separate legacy call centre systems into one single platform.
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It is also working with IBM which is building an internal cloud for the bank.
Mr Clyne said that NAB had now completed; “A lot of the foundation work in the technology space and a lot of the big customer facing applications will come online in coming months.” These he said would be “peer or market leading.”
Over the last six months the bank has upgraded its smartphone and tablet applications, and earlier this month unveiled a mobile banking app for Windows phones. Mr Clyne acknowledged that although the bank was pleased with the progress NAB had made with its technology transformation there remained “much to do.”
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