At the heart of the initiative is the most difficult part — the bank's core banking overhaul. "With any organization of the size of a major T1 bank, with its IT complexity, unraveling that is a bit of a challenge," Bennett acknowledges. One expected benefit: Bennett says he thinks NAB will be able to retire or decommission 100 legacy applications.
In the first stage of the Oracle deployment, NAB used it to relaunch UBank, its branchless, standalone direct online bank. "We installed new code with Oracle in February and March of this year, and linked that into our overall environment," Bennett says. The UBank upgrade let NAB streamline the underlying business processes of opening an account and transferring money to an account, thus lowering the total cost of ownership. It provides real-time processing of funds between UBank accounts and lets customers customize their online banking portal. A new business intelligence tool lets customers enter their personal data and search for people like them, to see others' income and spending patterns. Bennett expects customers to use this feature to find popular restaurants and shops in their neighborhood; ultimately he expects to offer this anonymized information to business customers. NAB will add more "drops of functionality" over time, he says.
In August the bank moved 300,000 UBank customers to the new platform. "That went very well and we're getting good feedback from customers about the functionality and the customer experience," Bennett says.
The UBank relaunch is the tip of the iceberg of the Oracle deployment to date, Bennett says: payments and accounts have also been migrated to the Oracle platform. Lending products will be next to shift to Oracle and eventually, even broad enterprise tools such as credit risk and compliance programs will move to Oracle.
In mid-December, NAB opened a social media command center in Melbourne where staff members use Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly Radian6) to field 5,000 comments and 600 customer service requests per month. "The impetus behind that is a recognition of changing customer expectations — customers increasingly want to be able to communicate 24/7, over mobile, wherever they are," Bennett says. "We want to present our customers with offers that make sense and let them access those offers from wherever they are, using any channel they choose. We also want to get a good sense of what people are saying out there, what our customers are looking for." The bank has 135,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn.
A recent cheeky interaction in its social media center helped NAB win a new client. A small business owner in Victoria sent a tweet to all the major banks in Australia: "OK Twitter: Westpac, NAB or CommBank? Which is the best of the bad bunch?" One of NAB's social media representatives replied: "I'm a little biased, but I hear @nab are fantastic." The small business owner replied, "hahaha. Okay. You guys win our business based on that tweet alone."
About two hours later, one of NAB's competitors posted an automated response to the tweet that said, "We have noticed your tweet. Please let us know if we can help you with anything. Thanks." The potential customer wrote back, "but your reply wasn't as cool as @nab's."
