NAB signs new multi-million-dollar deal with AWS

AWS NAB cloud contract

National Australia Bank (NAB) has reconfirmed its longstanding partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), announcing it has signed a new “multimillion-dollar, long-term deal” with the hyperscale cloud provider.

The deal is a critical step forward towards realising NAB’s overarching cloud strategy, enabling, the bank said, to “accelerate the migration of key critical workloads to AWS”.

Welcoming the deal, NAB’s technology and enterprise operations chief Patrick Wright said the bank was excited to extend its collaboration with AWS after a “long and proud relationship” of more than 13 years.

The deal will also see the incorporation of AWS’s omnichannel-ready, contact centre-as-a-service offering, Amazon Connect, which is expected to be deployed across all NAB call centres, Wright said.

He said the bank would capitalise on AWS Connect’s use of artificial intelligence and automation, which would help to deliver a more seamless and tailored experience for users whilst also ensuring they are connected to the most appropriate contact centre staff member for their needs.

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

He added: “Amazon Connect forms part of NAB’s digital internet banking experience so customers can call via a button within the Internet Banking app and be fully authenticated without having to go through a list of personal questions on the phone.”

Already, NAB, which is one of the most well-progressed of Australia’s major banks in its cloud migration journey, has moved more than 70 per cent of its applications to public cloud. The bank earlier this year revealed that it aims to have at least 80 per cent of its software and data in the cloud by 2023.

NAB, back in late 2020, became the first major Australian bank to move its business banking online platform to public cloud; it has also successfully migrated Murex, its global foreign exchange and trading platform, to cloud – a particularly sensitive workload, requiring a relatively high-level of APRA-mandated controls to operate in a public cloud environment. This has been facilitated through NAB’s own CAST governance framework.

Wright said cloud was now “ingrained” in the bank’s critical functions.

“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 for our customers, with added reliability.

The bank is also set to reap considerable operational cost-savings through the deal, noting that it has “recently optimised costs for its cloud-based infrastructure”.

With AWS utilising its next generation of Graviton processors – which, according to the cloud provider, deliver 25 per cent better compute performance than the previous generation processor – as well as other AWS innovations, the bank will yield over $1 million per month in cloud cost savings.

This, NAB said, would “[promote] a company culture focused on both efficiency and innovation for customers”.

While the new deal no doubt cements NAB’s long-standing relationship with AWS, the bank remains committed to its multi-cloud strategy, retaining its existing longstanding contracts with Microsoft Azure (which supports the bulk of its workplace technology) and Google Cloud.

Maintaining multiple cloud service providers also ensures NAB has at least two failover points for its data redundancy and systems restoration requirements.