NAB chief Cameron Clyne has countered suggestions that the bank is lagging behind in terms of its technology upgrade - despite the initiative having another six and a half years to run. He claims that there are few, if any, banks anywhere in the world with as ambitious a technology transformation target as NAB."There is a misconception about the scale of the projects that are being undertaken. We think that unless you are dealing with technology from top to bottom then you are not doing a comprehensive refresh. There are clearly people introducing point solutions, but we would argue we have the most comprehensive program, in fact, we are quite a way ahead in many respects," Clyne said yesterday."Yes it will take further time to evolve… but the reason we planned the technology update now is that, in fact, a lot of the technical complexity is… behind us and we are now starting to see the reorganised structure reaping the benefits. We would suggest that there isn't any bank in the world doing the full scope of what we are talking about."At the heart of the transformation program is the migration to the new Oracle-developed banking platform, dubbed NextGen by NAB. Released as a product last September, by Oracle, the NextGen platform is now used by NAB's UBank operations. NAB's personal banking customers will be using the platform by 2014 and business customers by 2016. However, the last legacy systems won't be decommissioned until after 2016.Once the transition to NextGen is complete, the bank will have a single view of each of its customers; it will be able to document a simple mortgage in less than an hour; and offer more than 100 self-service options over the internet.Benefits are already flowing through though. The bank said yesterday that the number of Severity 1 incidents it faces (a Sev 1 incident is a computer failure for which there is no obvious workaround) had been reduced by 66 per cent between 2009 and 2012. It also decommissioned 34 older systems as part of the technology rationalisation and refresh in 2012.The number of core banking products the bank supports has also fallen - from just under 500 in 2009 to 237 last year. Eventually, the bank wants further streamlining to reduce the number of products to less than 100. According to Clyne: "Technology… [will unleash] the potential to get a lot more out of what we do [but] with fewer products."Clyne added that the transformation and streamlining would deliver $800 million of annual cost savings by the end of the fifth year, although he acknowledged that this would be partly offset by higher software amortisation, reinvestment and implementation costs.Although overall group business services' operating expenses were steady during the last year compared with the year before, technology operating expenses rose from $581 million in the year to September 2011 to $599 million last year.While NextGen forms the foundation of the technology transformation, NAB executives were at pains yesterday to explain that the software