NAB signs global licensing deal with Microsoft

Beverley Head
Friday, 11 September 2009 08:00

IT Industry - Market

“We have done some outsourcing to Infosys and Satyam, but have no immediate plans for any further outsourcing at this point. That was something that was in place when I came into that role. We had wave one, we put wave two on hold and that is where it stands.”

Keeping IT in house may help Bennett achieve his ambitions to encourage more IT experimentation in NAB. He said that when he reviewed the NAB IT shop he found that before his arrival it had been hard for employees to get their ideas heard and acted upon. He said he wanted to encourage more innovation.

“We talk about experimentation and that’s something we need to be focussed on and do more of. We have a good track record of running some good experiments – UBank (NAB’s online bank brand) being one of them and I’d like to see us do more of that in the future.

“And we use the terminology of experimentation rather than pilot because a pilot indicates it’s just a matter of time until you get going, where an experiment is all about trying something new, seeing how it goes, trying something else and see how it goes. Some of them might take and others we would say we learned a bit from that but we won’t proceed.

“UBank is a great example of an experiment – a concept that is now getting a head of stream.”

It’s also a good sandbox for the NAB to have trialled Oracle’s i-flex. In August last year the bank announced it would invest $30 million to use i-flex as the platform for UBank. Since then Oracle has been confirmed as the partner with which NAB will develop its Nextgen computing platform to replace core legacy systems and provide a platform for the future.

That project, estimated to have a $1 billion price tag, is being overseen by Christine Bartlett, who along with Adam Bennett reports into NAB’s Gavin Slater, the group executive for group business services.

While Bennett is not responsible for Nextgen he describes his and Bartlett’s relationship as close. Both are based in Sydney rather than Melbourne which hosts the bank’s main data centre and the bulk of the Bank Oracle team.

Bennett said the bank was working with a three year horizon in mind for Nextgen, although additional work would continue after that.