Like many banks, National Australia Bank (NAB) decided to outsource a large part of its operations in the 1990s. “We pushed all our operations and a large part of our development capability out to third parties with the intent of lowering costs and making our operations far more process driven,” says Steve Day, the chief technology officer of enterprise technology at National Australia Bank.

Unfortunately, achieving these goals had an unintended consequence. “We froze our operations in time,” says Day. “If you roll forward to 2018, we realized that we were still operating like we're in the 1990s. We were very waterfall driven. Our systems were highly processed driven, but in a very manual way, and it took us a very long time to roll out new products and services that our customers really needed.”

Meanwhile, young financial services companies were coming to market with innovative products and services and NAB was finding it difficult to compete. “Many customers today are expecting an Amazon experience, a Google experience, a Meta experience, but we were still operating in the 1990s,” says Day. “We stood back, and we looked at it, and we decided that our entire culture needed to change.”

What ensued was nothing less than an internal transformation. “Our original teams didn't have a lot of tech skills, so to tell them that they were going to have to take on all of this technical accountability, an operational task that had previously been handed to our outsourcers, was daunting,” says Day.

Day and his team rolled out a number of initiatives to instill confidence across the organization and train people in the necessary technical skills. “We built confidence through education, through a lot of cultural work, a lot of explaining the strategy, a lot of explaining to people what good looked like in 2020, and how we were going to get to that place,” says Day.

This episode of Business Lab is produced in association with Infosys Cobalt.

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