NAB has renewed its longstanding partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with the new deal promising to accelerate the bank’s migration of critical workloads to AWS cloud and further develop the its generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities.
The new agreement with AWS extends a 2022 deal, with the “major investment… another important step in continuing to embed NAB’s multi-cloud approach”, the bank said.
AWS Cloud, foundational to NAB’s multi-cloud operating environment (which also includes Microsoft’s rival Azure cloud service), serves as the primary cloud provider for a number of the bank’s core applications. This includes hosting NAB’s retail internet banking services, its online business banking solution, NAB Connect, and its cloud-native Simple Home Loans platform, which today supports around a quarter of the bank’s broker-generated home loans.
The bank said it has also recently rolled out Amazon Connect, AWS’s omnichannel contact centre service. The cloud-based contact centre boasts inbuilt customer self-service and automation capabilities, including chatbots, task routing and interactive voice responses, as well as journey mapping and customer interaction analytics.
NAB is also leveraging Amazon Q, AWS’s dedicated GenAI assistant, as a pair programming tool for its engineers. More than 1,000 NAB technologists are now trained and using the code generating tool, NAB said.
Amazon Q’s GenAI capability can also be paired with Amazon Connect to automatically detect customer service issues in real-time, as well as provide agents with contextual customer information and responses and actions for resolution.
Commenting on the contract extension with AWS, NAB group executive technology and enterprise operations, Patrick Wright said: “We are one of the most advanced banks in the world for cloud adoption.
“This approach is powering our ability to deliver new and improved services to market more quickly for our customers, with added reliability.
“We also recognise AWS’s significant investments in highly secure and resilient global infrastructure to keep data safe, which NAB can leverage.”
Wright added: “There are several areas we continue to work closely with AWS on, including continued adoption of GenAI tools like Amazon Q Developer, alongside other improvements we are making to simplify how we work to boost productivity and speed of delivery to market.”
NAB notes it has now successfully migrated 84 per cent of its on-premises infrastructure to a public multi-cloud environment.