End is nigh for NAB core banking revamp
Nearly there?
National Australia Bank (NAB) appears to be entering the final stages of its seven-year Oracle-based “NextGen” core banking overhaul.
The bank originally planned to build an in-house mortgage origination platform, beginning with its digital banking subsidiary UBank. But that was scrapped – with the loss of AU$106 million ($81 million) – and Oracle FSS was chosen instead. The vendor is supplying a broad range of its software to NAB, including its new core banking solution, Oracle Banking Platform (OBP).
The bank went live the personal banking originations platform last year as a replacement for its older Oracle’s Siebel platform.
Andrew Cresp, general manager, core banking technology (divisional CIO), at NAB, says it has now been deployed to the bank’s 900 branches, covering 800 employees and eight million personal banking customers.
Now that the system is live across Australia, NAB says it can approve a personal loan for an existing customer in four minutes, and in 11 minutes for new customers.
But to get to this point it’s been a long and winding road. The bank started rolling out the platform in South Australia and the Northern Territory in August 2015, with Western Australia delayed until February this year.
There is also the question of NAB View, its customer relationship database deployed last year, and which replaced its 40-year-old IMS database.
While the end is in sight, it still has to deal with the shift of business customers to the originations platform, and the migration of personal banking customers to NAB View.
NAB offers no specific timeline for the migrations, but instead will take an “incremental approach” based on the “areas of highest value to the bank”.
Innovation nations
In a separate development, NAB has recently partnered with Canada’s CIBC and Israel’s Bank Leumi for innovations.
With this tie-up, the banks say they will share some product development ideas and exchange employee talent.
