National Australia Bank is making progress in the overhaul of its core banking technology - progress of a kind that a neutral observer might label as methodical and a cynical observer view as slower than planned.At the investor briefing last Thursday for the bank's full-year profit, Cameron Clyne, NAB's managing director, listed a number of highlights of what he liked to call "re-platforming".Among highlights of work completed are the "infrastructure and network transformation, [which] is about getting the infrastructure layer right, and ensuring the plumbing and wiring are in place.  "You may recall that was 28 per cent complete at the half year. It is now 100 per cent complete. "The key achievements have been: completing the network modernisation; the implementation of the new general ledger and financial system; and the deploying of additional functionality in the securitisation engine, which would be a very important support to our funding strategy."There is also progress in the "transformation of mortgage process", Clyne said, with "significant improvements with conversion rates, increasing to 59 per cent from 40 per cent, and loan documentation dramatically reduced, from 50 pages to four, as an example."Clyne said: "In 2012, our key priorities include progressing the payment system replacement, implementing this single customer view capability, and continuing to extend UBank's capability, amongst other priorities."This list of project plans does not mention any timeline for the transition of the core deposit accounts and loan processes on to the "Next Generation" system, or systems, being built on an Oracle platform. At the investor briefing, one analyst, Craig Williams from Citi, asked when loans would be migrated, and when might customer benefits emerge.Clyne responded: "We obviously have UBank actually building a customer platform, and we are increasing the functionality on that platform.  So, at least that gives an insight to people as to the sort of functionality there is going to exist in the market.  "We are very comfortable with progress on this, we've called out that it is a multi-year program.  "The other thing is we've taken a quite deliberate approach of actually spending that money, one of the initial components of the money, on the infrastructure line."But you've got to have a solid foundation. So, we prioritise things like financial systems, credit risk and securitisation platforms, because we've got to do them at some point."Gavin Slater, group executive for group business services at NAB, said: "We've mentioned it in the presentation, it is a multilevel transformation… below the ground [and] we've got a huge transformation program underway."And we are currently executing around our selection, your mainframes, your servers and all of those, and, as we are replacing those, that will provide better systems, availability and capability as well."Slater cited as an example of benefits "availability for our core channels like NAB Connect and business banking, ATMs and internet banking."He said the bank had experienced a reduction of "as much as 50 per cent" in "technology-related incidents in our retail network… so that's been again more system availability for our