National
Australia Bank operates in over 1,800 service centres and branches and it is responsible to over 460, 000
shareholders. The bank also has over 40,000 people and it deals with major
financial services franchises the United Kingdom, United States, New Zealand,
Asia and Australia (www.nabgroup.com).
Though each of its brands is uniquely positioned, the bank is committed towards the provision of quality products and services, relationships, charges and fair fees, guidance and advice. The bank also has a goal towards the deliverance of satisfactory and sustainable returns to shareholders. To date, National Australia Bank has become a group which has around 11 million customers and 38,953 employees.
Though each of its brands is uniquely positioned, the bank is committed towards the provision of quality products and services, relationships, charges and fair fees, guidance and advice. The bank also has a goal towards the deliverance of satisfactory and sustainable returns to shareholders. To date, National Australia Bank has become a group which has around 11 million customers and 38,953 employees.
Complexity of the organization
National
Australia Bank has four types of brands which are located in different regions
like in Australia, New Zealand, United States and United Kingdom. The four brands are responsible for the Board
of Directors and it is managed by the Group Executive Committee. There are two banking franchises in the United
Kingdom region and they include the Yorkshire Bank and the Clydesdale Bank
(www.nabgroup.com). The two banking franchises are responsible for supporting
business, retail as well as the corporate banking service to over 2.7 million
customers using more than 300 retail branches. The bank has also founded a
network of Financial Solution Centers which will be helpful in offering high
integrated private and business banking services to their customers.
Great
Western Bank is the banking franchise in the United States region and provides
business, agriculture and consumer banking to more than 300,000 customers
through 125 branches which are found in across seven states in the region. The
seven states are mainly in the mid-west agricultural of the US. In this region,
high attention is paid agriculture and business banking with the Great Western
Bank aiming at keeping a constant growth in consumer deposits.
Four
business areas are found in the Australian region and they include the NAB
business banking, NAB wholesale banking, and NAB personal banking and MLC
&NAB wealth. Personal banking is mostly used with over three million micro
business and personal customers dealing with their businesses by personal
banking (www.nabgroup.com). There
are five business fields in the business banking area and they include the NAB
business, working capital services, institutional banking, and corporate
banking specialized business, business operations, strategy and marketing.
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Being a leading business bank in terms of
market share, NAB has over 700,000 clients who range from mid-markets and SMEs
to large institutional clients who usually get insights and solutions from the
NAB team. The MLC &NAB wealth team which has around 5,000 employees is
aimed at supplying corporate customers and individual investors throughout the
Australian region with investment solutions, private wealth and superannuation
insurance. NAB is also responsible for wholesale banking throughout all the
business regions in Australia.
BNZ
and BNZ partners are responsible for supplying agribusiness and retail banking
as well as insurance services to more than one million customers in the New
Zealand region. Lots of innovative concepts are designed with the aim of
supporting customers with different customer experience from the traditional
banking (www.nabgroup.com). The new concepts which are on mobile banking carts
&trailers and stores are aimed providing solutions to customers on daily
basis. In Asia, NAB pays a huge attention in corporate banking and the retail
customers in Asia with the aim of helping the Australian corporate customers
who are doing business in Asia and the Asian companies doing business in
Australia. There are more than 2500 employees in Wholesale banking located in
Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States. They
can provide the funding solutions, investment solutions, client risk management
solutions, asset servicing and research.
Figure
1: Complexity
of NAB
Technical
complexity of NAB
Being
a global service organization, NAB has introduced and improved on its IT
infrastructures so as to enhance the operation of its services. NAB has built
an integrated technology environment through the establishment of WAN which
connected its 1200 branches around Australia. The integrated technology
included Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition Operating system, windows XP
Professional so as to optimize the agility of the business. Windows Server 2008 was integrated with
existing processes and technologies to improve stability and further simplify
deployment, get more efficient wide-scale deployment over a low-bandwidth WAN,
and ease management and alleviate security risks NAB
has also adopted a customer relationship management system. Being an
organization which provides services to million customers, NAB has adopted a
CRM to help it identify relevant customer’s sales and opportunities with much
ease. In order to identifying
relevant customer sales & service opportunities easily, the “national
leads” analytical CRM system developed by Siebel was implemented.
It
has also adopted CRM so as to enable it catch up with other banks which have
invested in CRM. In late 2003, NAB wholesale Banking
began trials o VMware ESX2.0.0 to provide computing resources equivalent to 500
servers coupled with many running system instances for test and development
purposes. In mid-2007, the upgrading of VMware infrastructure was started.
Financial resources of NAB
NAB
had an aggregate asset of over $260 billion in 2009 which made it to be ranked
as one of the largest banks globally. In the same year, the organization had a
net interest income of $12,068 million which increased by $970 million or an
8.7% increase from the previous year. This is a clear indication how the
organization has had a strong financial position though during a period of
financial crisis. In the report,
operating expenses is $7,979 million in 2009 9.6% higher than 2008. The
organization also spent around 1.7 million towards the improvement of their IT
strategy and infrastructure. With the above analysis, Enterprise Architecture
is good for the development of organization and the cost will not be a problem
to the organization (Schekkerman, 2008).
Competition
in the industry and in that region
NAB
is ranked the 17th largest bank in the world and one of the largest
banks in Australia by market capitalization. The success in both Australian market and the
worldwide market inspire the group with more ambitious development. The
main competitors include the ANZ, Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank which have
gained considerable achievement in the recent years. Other banks have been
using considerable amount of money in the improvement on the Enterprises Architecture
which is a competitive challenge to NAB (McGovern and Ambler, 2003). NAB has been experiencing high competition and
for it to remain competitive in the market, it has to improve on service
deliverance and management. In this case, NAB can not delay the development of
Enterprise Architecture otherwise it may be too late to react (Schekkerman,
2008).
The
managerial expertise to develop Enterprise Architecture
NAB
has its own information development department which helped the organization in
setting up CRM system. The members in these department posses high level of
education and are highly experienced. Most of the executive members in the
organization have over 20 years experience in finance and banking. These
executive members also hold degree and masters in the relevant courses which
makes NAB to have highly qualified manager’s hence high managerial expertise. With
the use of their expertise, these executives have largely contributed to the
development of NAB and the team is effective in the development of Enterprise Architecture
(Schekkerman, 2008). The setting of enterprise architecture has not been a hard
task for NAB as it has highly qualified managerial expertise.
Level
of strategic planning in NAB
Nowadays, organizations struggle with
the basic system, network management and data storage. Every company wishes to
reduce costs while improving service levels and get more profits. At present,
new technology continually come and go, we have to update our current IT, not
only for technologically feasible but also for the strategically needed. There
is a high level of strategic planning in NAB since this is needed for the bank
to remain competitive in the banking industry. NAB
being one of the largest financial institutions; it needs to improve its system
and architecture with the aim of improving its website in order to satisfy the
customers who makes their transactions online.
They have since partnered with Oracle as part of its strategy with the
aim of improving the organizations existing system and to combine it with service
architecture (McGovern and Ambler, 2003). With the help of the Enterprise Architecture,
NAB will be able to devise strategy maps, corporate policies and goals which
will see to the provision of better services to its customers (Schekkerman,
2008).
References
Graves.T,
(2009). Enterprise Architecture. IT
Governance Publishing
McGovern.J,
Ambler.S.W, (2003). A practical guide to
enterprise architecture. Prentice Hall PTR
NAB, 2011, Accessed on 12th April,
2011 http://www.nabgroup.com/
Schekkerman.J,
(2008). Enterprise architecture: good
practices guide: how to manage the enterprise
architecture practice. Trafford
Wagter.R,
(2005). Dynamic enterprise architecture:
how to make it work. John Wiley and Sons
NAB Annual Reports,
‘NAB’, Accessed on 12th April, 2011
