NAB spent $548 million on technology infrastructure during FY24 as part of its ongoing modernisation push.
For the 12 months ending 30 September 2024, NAB’s infrastructure investments increased by $34 million – or 6.6 percent -, which the bank said reflected “continued investment in technology resilience and simplification”.
Specifically, these investments included building its data platform and capabilities, cyber security and cloud migration, with NAB recently renewing its agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for core business applications.
Overall, NAB’s investment spending and capitalised software hit $1.6 billion in FY24, rising by four percent or $64 million from 2023.
Of this, NAB invested $554 million in compliance and risk solutions, a 4.7 percent rise over last year, and $536 million on what it terms “customer experience, efficiency and sustainable revenue”.
In its annual report [pdf], the bank noted its focus on an “uplift in technology and compliance capabilities including fraud and cyber security, partially offset by productivity benefits achieved through continued process improvements and simplification of the group’s operations”.
At the same time, NAB’s operating technology expenses grew by 12.1 percent to $2.03 billion.
This was attributed to additional software and technology costs related to “modernisation and compliance” including fraud and cyber security, combined with “higher amortisation associated with software asset”.
During the year, NAB has emerged as an adopter of Microsoft’s Copilot for Security and unveiled a series of modernisation efforts across its marketing technology capabilities, as part of a customer experience uplift program.
These steps are visible across NAB’s different banking divisions. In its business and private banking unit, digital, data and analytics have helped drive growth across the franchise, the report said.
In the personal banking division, NAB launched its digital home lending platform, with the bank claiming that “the proportion of simple everyday banking products opened digitally increased from 62 percent to 72 percent”.
Statutory net profit for the financial year was $6.96 billion, down 6.1 percent year-on-year.