With a focus on building a series of tech guilds to help train and develop thousands of its engineers.

NAB has embarked on a significant technology journey over the past few years, modernising in-house technical skills, in-house capabilities, and accelerating a culture and mindset toward a successful public cloud adoption strategy to help strengthen the bank’s technology foundations

In it’s first major revision of its technology strategy since 2018, simplification, skills and platform-based architectures are likely to be given an elevated status and importance.

Steve Day, NAB’s Chief Technology Officer sat down with MIT Technology Review to discuss how the bank embraced a culture change that has resulted in a number of key achievements.

“The technology areas in financial services companies have become increasingly complex over the years to the point where they’re extremely complex today, and we need to simplify that,” he told ITNEWS

Since 2018, NAB has migrated around 60 percent of its applications to the cloud and is on track to meet its target of 80 percent in 2023.

The revised technology strategy is likely to drive home the importance of code and microservices reuse, and of standardisation of approaches, which Day characterised as “one way, same way”.

NAB has also seen a 30% improvement in technology productivity and a significant reduction in critical incidents, largely due to the fact that it brings about 69% of its technology workforce in-house, up from the roughly 30% just four years.

The bank has also focused on building a series of tech guilds to help train and develop thousands of its engineers.

“We built a cloud guild, a data guild, an insourcing framework. We built our NAB Engineering Foundation and with a goal of building a culture of innovation of cloud, of agile, and being able to deliver great products and services to our customers in a cost effective, but very safe way. And as part of that, we started on our cloud migrations and that is really moving at pace now,” Steve said.

“NAB itself needs to add 1500 tech people this year. We’re putting in place lots of programs to do that, like our technology internship program to employ over 500 interns this year, our Return to Work program and neurodiversity.”

Day said that a strong technology strategy, and having an environment that tech people wanted to work on, remained core to the bank’s recruitment and retention strategy.

“Underscoring the bank’s tech talent drive and focus on building strong technology foundations is getting the basics right, and a fundamental commitment to delivering seamless digital customer experiences,” said Day