Diverging tech leadership paths for NAB & Westpac
(1 October 2019 - Australia) As one of NAB's most senior technology executives departs the bank, Westpac saw its new CTO make his first public comments since joining the group in August this year.
NAB Executive General Manager, Business Enabling Technology, Yuri Misnik has reportedly stepped down from his role preceding the entrance of incoming CEO Ross McEwan in December. Having deployed the bank's enormous technology budget since 2017, Mr Misnik had been heading up the group's cloud transformation and legacy CRM systems conversion to Salesforce. Unlike the other Big Four majors, NAB abandoned a group level CIO leadership position to instead favour combined roles of COO and CTO held by Patrick Wright.
NAB incurred its worst outage rate since 2017 in May despite positive market communications and plans to migrate more than 300 applications, including core banking systems, to Amazon Web Services (AWS) by the end of 2019. Mr Misnik was a former AWS executive and was previously Global Digital CIO at HSBC UK, Microsoft, CBA and the ATO.
Westpac’s new CTO David Walker is targeting conversational banking interfaces and internal culture as two key areas of focus according to Westpac Wire. Smartphones may be displaced within the subsequent decade as cloud, biometrics and artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly drive customers from screens to conversational interfaces.
Mr Walker used the internal Westpac convention ‘TECHx19’ to outline a case for cultural change within the group, suggesting that banks needed to shift to engineering-inspired cultures throughout. Westpac Wire noted that during his time at DBS the group retained technology and IT talent well. Mr Walker stated that transformation at DBS had been 'hard work' but necessary as the institution set itself a challenge “to reimagine banking”.
“We had to think about this as transforming end-to-end. It wasn’t just about tech, it was about how we organise ourselves, how we move from projects to product focus, doing agile properly, automating everything and how we design systems. We still need to be worried about mobile apps because that’s today, we still need to be good at that. But I used to talk about being mobile first, conversational next, so invest in conversation to the point where we’re getting ready" Mr Walker stated.
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