NAB spent $200 million on software related to its NextGeneration technology transformation during the last financial year and claims it is on track for its 2016 project completion deadline.Chief executive Cameron Clyne said that the bank "is ahead of where I expected to be" with regard to the 10-year technology transformation. When the project is completed, in 2016, the bank will have replaced 10,000 pieces of equipment, transitioned to a new data centre and re-engineered its payment systems. At the heart of the program is the NextGen banking platform, which has been developed by Oracle in association with NAB.An earlier version of the platform was used as the foundation for NAB's online-only subsidiary, UBank. Although the only transaction product that has migrated to the new platform is UBank's Usaver Ultra account, Clyne said that a number of back office systems, such as credit risk and the general ledger, had also moved on to the new platform.The nabtrade online share trading system has been built on NextGen, and other back office systems have been moved across to allow more straight-through processing. For example, an automated property title transaction system has been introduced and out-bound customer correspondence has been digitised.Once complete, the platform is expected to last at least a decade, as indicated by NAB's announcement yesterday that it had changed the term over which it will amortise core banking systems, increasing that period from five to seven years, and now to seven to 10 years.The financial results reveal NAB has capitalised its current software assets at $1.99 billion and forecast this figure will reach $2.5 billion by the 2016 financial year.NAB also signalled good progress had been made with product rationalisation, saying that the retail bank had halved the number of products it offered since 2010. It's not just what customers buy but how they buy it that is changing. During briefings yesterday, Clyne said that the bank had seen a "huge uptake from customers around digital self-service." In terms of future product design, the bank is likely to benefit from improved analysis of customer preferences as it pushes ahead with big data initiatives. It announced yesterday that it had implemented a "centralised knowledge management tool" to improve its ability to analyse customer data.