National Australia Bank switches off ageing credit risk engine

National Australia Bank (NAB) has retired 37 servers and an aging credit risk engine (CRE) which performed data processing as its NextGen core banking platform project continues.

According to NAB CIO David Boyle, decommissioning the old CRE and its 37 servers will lead to a “significant drop” in the bank’s ongoing maintenance effort and power supply. However, NAB could not provide any forecast power savings.

A new CRE has provided an improvement in data processing times, Boyle said in a statement.

“The CRE uses a commercially available platform that can be readily upgraded and maintained, as opposed to the old bespoke credit risk engines that many banks have relied on in the past.”

A NAB spokesperson told CIO Australia the servers were nine years old and the replacement CRE was rolled out on the bank’s Information Analytics Platform (IAP).

“The next stage of the project is to move the IAP onto NAB’s private cloud,” said the spokesperson.

The private cloud environment is hosted at one of the bank’s two data centres in Deer Park, Melbourne. NAB has forecast operational cost reductions of $22 million over seven years as it consolidates 20 data centres and computer rooms down to two facilities in Melbourne. The consolidation project is expected to be complete in mid-2015.

In December 2013, NAB announced 4 million customers will be migrated to its NextGen core banking platform over the next three years.

At the time, NAB’s enterprise services transformation group executive, Lisa Gray, said that from early 2015, customers will be able to open an NAB-branded personal account on the NextGen platform.

The banking platform is part of a 10-year business transformation initiative to modernise the bank’s IT systems.

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