There are some additional insights into the cost control philosophy of National Australia Bank in its MLC unit in an interview with June Crowley, general manager of technology.
Crowley told
FST Media that "we have had a three year target since 2006 to reduce the cost of business as usual technology by 20 per cent. We are on track to achieve this by leveraging our partners and rationalising our systems."
Crowley said MLC maintained its focus on innovation even so.
Asked by FST about NAB's latest five-year plan to overhaul core banking systems (and referred to at NAB as the Next Gen Platform) Crowley said "the Next Gen Platform program is not limited to the replacement of the core banking system; this is merely the first step.
"As part of NAB Technology, MLC is very much part of the technology transformation including Next Gen. The key strategy behind Next Gen is to leverage the technology scale inherent in the key technology players.
"As you will be aware NAB has chosen Oracle as its key partner for the product administration domain.
"To date we have been closely involved in the selection of Oracle as a partner and have spent a lot of time understanding the Oracle offering and its potential for MLC. MLC (technology and business) will be extending this early work in 2009 by embarking on an exercise to evaluate the opportunities for MLC from this partnership.
"As it happens we are well placed to do this. Our target architecture, based on SOA, is well advanced with around 50 to 70 per cent of our systems aligned to Oracle, either databases or application systems."
NAB selected Oracle as the basis of the overhaul of its IT in the middle of 2008 and indicated back in August that it would continue to work on mapping out the updated IT strategy through until early this year.
The Oracle platform may be used at first to support the micro bank brands NAB has in mind, though the first of these - Ubank, introduced in October last year - operates on legacy systems.