Four years of investment in technology has helped drive improved customer satisfaction in NAB's digital services and laid the foundations to now accelerate.
NAB has moved more than 60% of its applications to the cloud and is seeing the benefits of a more resilient and flexible technology environment, resulting in an 87% reduction in critical incidents since 2018.
Speaking to analysts at the bank's Half Year results update on May 5, NAB Chief Executive Officer Ross McEwan said while there was still much to do, the bank was improving for customers and colleagues.
"The investment in our technology foundations over the past four to five years puts us in a good position today," Mr McEwan said.
"These foundations have supported our progress in leveraging digital, data and analytics to deliver better experiences to customers and colleagues."
In highlighting the progress made, Mr Ewan pointed to improvements in customer satisfaction across a number of NAB's digital channels.
"The improvements in our digital tools for customers have resulted in increased net promotor scores, with our mobile and online banking platforms ranked number two of the major banks," he said.
"The Net Promotor Score for NAB Connect, which is our internet banking platform for business customers, has seen a strong 17-point improvement over the last three years.
"While we have made good progress on our digital propositions, there is more to do."
Mr McEwan said the appointment of Angie Mentis as Group Executive Digital, Data and Analytics would give NAB the focus it needed to accelerate.
Ms Mentis said that over the next two to three years the ambition was to accelerate the delivery of a consistent customer and colleague experience across the NAB Group.
"The experiences we deliver for our customers should rival the experience they have with any company, not just a bank," Ms Mentis said.
"We want to personalise digital customer experiences, create an easy and consistent customer onboarding experience, empower our bankers with digital tools and insights through a single frontend, and deliver digital tools to enable colleague self-service.
"We must be experience-led. This means solving problems once for the enterprise, on an architecture that is modern, cloud first, API-enabled and scalable."
Tech talent appointed
To help deliver on this ambition, Ms Mentis highlighted the appointments of a number of new executives with global experience.
Lance Thornswood has recently been appointed as NAB Chief Design Officer, joining from U.S. Bank where he was Senior Vice President and Head of Design. Sujeet Rana has been appointed as NAB Chief Digital Officer, coming across from Coles where he was GM Customer Experience & Technology.
The pair join Christian Nelissen who was appointed NAB Chief Data and Analytics Officer late last year.
"We want to bring the best and brightest people to help us deliver seamless experiences for our colleagues and customers," Ms Mentis.
"It doesn't matter what sector you work in, just about every business is looking for great talent in the tech and digital space.
"We're continuing to build on this by setting up communities of practice in digital, and data and will bring a Human-Centred Design approach to all of our solutions through our new Design Practice."
Investing in people
In addition to top executive talent, Ms Mentis said NAB was continuing to invest in developing its people.
"Over the last four years, our ongoing investment in upskilling and reskilling our colleagues has resulted in more than 7,000 people gaining cloud skills and over 2,500 industry certifications," she said.
"We're also working closely with a number of Universities and this year we have doubled the size of our technology internship with more than 500 interns joining us."
If you want to find out more about a tech or digital career with NAB, please see here.
