Business Lab

Like many banks, National Australia Bank (NAB) decided to outsource a large part of its operations in the 1990s. “We pushed all our operations and a large part of our development capability out to third parties with the intent of lowering costs and making our operations far more process driven,” says Steve Day, the chief technology officer of enterprise technology at National Australia Bank. Unfortunately, achieving these goals had an unintended consequence. “We froze our operations in time,” says Day. “If you roll forward to 2018, we realized that we were still operating like we're in the 1990s. We were very waterfall driven. Our systems were highly processed driven, but in a very manual way, and it took us a very long time to roll out new products and services that our customers really needed.” Meanwhile, young financial services companies were coming to market with innovative products and services and NAB was finding it difficult to compete. “Many customers today are expecting an Amazon experience, a Googl