Oz Bank share price dives after reveal of IBM/Oracle plan
National Australia Bank investors don't like the look of its IT plans
Posted in Management, 13th March 2013 22:59 GMT
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Is it feasible that investors are belatedly learning that a technology refresh might involve spending huge amounts of money on risky projects?
If the National Australia Bank's experience yesterday (13 March) is any guide, the answer might be a tentative “yes”. The bank, which suffered some high-profile outages during 2012, delivered a group strategy and technology announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange, only to see its share price fall by 2.5 per cent on the news.
The strategy – which also includes corporate reorganisation, a shift to smaller branches, greater emphasis on self-service, a product reorganisation, and job cuts – is designed to save the bank $AU800 million.
The bank's executives must be wondering what might count as “doing IT right” after the share price fall. In the technology presentation to investors, it claimed already-significant progress in rebuilding its platforms since 2009, replacing its voice infrastructure to a virtualised hosted platform and replacing disparate networks with a national MPLS operation.
It also claimed significant progress towards a migration of its IT platforms to a private cloud under the hand of IBM, a nearly-complete patching regime that would improve security, and an ongoing project to replace its more than 20 data centres with just two, in Digital Realty facilities, by 2014.
Its next focus – which goes hand-in-hand with the reduction in the number of products the bank offers – is to integrate its upper-layer systems. Its enterprise, core banking, and channel systems will be rebuilt on the Oracle Banking Platform under a program dubbed “NextGen”. The contract with Oracle was announced in January of this year, and is based on a product suite first launched in September 2012.
Perhaps to reassure investors about the perceived risk of using a brand-new environment, NAB emphasised that the Oracle Banking Platform is already in use in its Ubank self-service products. Customers of NAB-branded personal products will be migrated to the Oracle platform in 2014, business customers by 2016, after which, the bank says it will decommission its remaining legacy systems.
Surprisingly, at least to The Register, the bank hasn't yet achieved what's been an aim of most enterprise systems, particularly CRM, for more than a decade – delivering a single customer view. Its presentation to investors notes that in 2009, it still had 20 partial systems and databases to deal with, and the “single customer view” is still listed as a future project.
What's most interesting about all of this is: over the years, Australia's big banks have been staples of tech press success stories (NAB among them: its cloudy Ubank products were case studies back as far as 2011). But when they're talking to investors, it seems, everything looks much more like a work-in-progress. ®
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COMMENTS
good thing I don't bank there ...
"The bank's executives must be wondering what might count as “doing IT right” "
Well not handing your customer's data over to a US company, required by law to give unrestricted and unquestioned access to the US govt. might be a good start. Makes me wonder how they intend to comply with the data protection act ...
Not that I expect any investors were thinking along those lines. They probably heard 'cloud' and immediately hit the sell button .. or heard 'IBM' and remembered the cluster-fuck that was Qld Health's payroll system ...
Re: good thing I don't bank there ...
"Irrelevant minnow"? Horse feathers.
NAB is 36th largest by assets in the world. All the Australian big four are in the top 50 banks in the world, see http://www.bankersaccuity.com/resources/bank-rankings/ .
Australia's banking sector is very concentrated, so the big four are very big banks in global terms.
US subsidiaries should ship your data to the home of the free if Uncle Sam asks for it...
IIUC, US regulations don't care if they're subsidiaries... (don't know where they draw the line: wholly owned, majority owned, somebody on the board who has a fondness for US products...)...
NAB was actually down 1.87%.
CBA was -1.7%, WBC was -2.12%
I really don't think that this had anything to do with the well trailed IT update, more to do with UBS calling the top in the Banks yesterday morning.
Re: good thing I don't bank there ...
also.. "Private Cloud"
That's would be NAB's cloud, not IBM's.
Cloud = two datacentres and an F5.
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