NAB signs multimillion-dollar, multi-year AWS deal

National Australia Bank (NAB) has secured a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services to ramp up its cloud-first technology strategy.

The bank will adopt AWS’ new Arm-based Graviton processors to help improve its efficiency and sustainability in the cloud, as well as ramping up the migration of its key critical workloads to AWS.

NAB group executive technology and enterprise operations Patrick Wright said the company’s investment in the cloud and collaboration with AWS was enabling it to be more innovative, agile and cost effective.

“The cloud is now ingrained at NAB. Our Simple Home Loans, internet banking, NAB Connect online business platform, and recently launched NAB Now Pay Later product are just some of our customer services being enabled by the cloud,” Wright said.

“The cloud is powering our ability to deliver new and improved services to market more quickly, with added reliability. NAB also benefits from significant investment AWS is making in world-class highly secure and resilient global infrastructure, as part of the cloud shared security model. In combination with NAB’s investments in security, we create a highly secure environment to keep our customers and the bank safe.”

NAB said it has moved some 70 percent of its applications to the cloud since accelerating its cloud strategy in 2018, including its business banking online platform and Global foreign exchange and trading platform (Murex). The bank also said its migration to call centre platform Amazon Connect, first announced in 2019, is also set to complete the rollout.

Wright added, “We’ve had a long and proud relationship with AWS dating back to 2013 and we are excited to extend this collaboration.”

“AWS is a critical partner in our technology strategy and is helping us deliver new and innovative experiences for our customers.We will soon complete our roll-out of Amazon Connect, AWS’s ‘smart’ cloud contact centre offering, which will be delivered across all of NAB Group’s call centres.”

Wright said NAB was benefiting from Amazon Connect’s automation and AI capabilities, helping the bank run its call centres more efficiently and provide a more tailored customer experience.

“We want to deliver more personalised experiences for customers, aligned to their preferences in how they want to interact with us,” he said.

AWS ANZ managing director Rianne Van Veldhuizen said, “Cloud is one of the defining technologies of the financial services industry and AWS is helping banking leaders like NAB drive innovation and business growth. One of the key benefits of NAB’s transformation is the ability for the bank to become data-driven, which allows their data scientists, engineers, marketers, and other roles to make better informed decisions, faster.”

“We’re proud to help NAB continue to leverage the scale, resilience, and security of AWS to accelerate product development, operate more efficiently and more cost effectively while exceeding customer expectations and meeting the necessary compliance requirements.”