NAB's four-step plan for NextGen

NAB chief information officer David Boyle has delivered the clearest update yet on the bank's progress with its NextGen software transformation project.

While CEO Andrew Thorburn last week noted that the project was still being formally reviewed Boyle said that the bank would finish building the NextGen technology stack, based on Oracle software, next year.

Speaking at FST Media's Future of Banking and Financial Services conference in Sydney yesterday Boyle said; "NextGen has taken longer and cost more than we would have liked - but we need a modern platform."

The first phase of NextGen involved developing new systems to support finance, risk and treasury operations delivering securitisation, a new general ledger and funds transfer pricing capabilities. That is now complete.

Second is the new core banking platform. This is already being used by 400,000 UBank customers - but from the blueprint Thorburn presented to investors last week it appears that the bank won't transition NAB customers off old legacy platforms to the new core banking platform much before 2017.

The third element is the NABView customer hub containing 12 million customer records and details of customers' 150 million banking relationships. This is now being rolled out to support NAB's bankers with a single view of the customer.

The fourth and final component of NextGen is the product origination platform which will be rolled out in 2015.

Boyle said that completing that component would be an important milestone for NAB as it would establish the final architecture of the bank's information systems into which new services could be interspersed in the future.

The task of actually migrating NAB customer accounts off legacy platforms and onto the new NextGen system is taking a back seat until the build of the entire platform is completed.