National Australia Bank enhances customer experiences and powers GenAI

“Removing complex legacy technology from our ecosystem and replacing it with Fivetran and Databricks to unify our data has been the springboard to enable all of the exciting generative AI use cases we are pursuing.”
— Joanna Gurry, Executive of Data Platforms at National Australia Bank

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Key results:

• 50% reduction in data ingestion costs
• 30% increase in the performance of machine learning models
• 1,000+ users migrated and able to access data

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Data stack:

• Pipelines: Fivetran
• Destination: Databricks
• Data sources: Oracle, Postgres, SQL Server, Salesforce, MySQL, Qualtrics, Fivetran Log

National Australia Bank (NAB) is Australia’s largest business bank and the second largest overall by market capitalization, valued at around $100 billion. It operates across 700 locations, serves 10 million customers and employs 38,000 people.

To remain competitive and meet the complex needs of its diverse customer base, NAB faced significant challenges with several legacy data systems, including increasing costs and frequent service disruptions. 

Joanna Gurry, Executive of Data Platforms at NAB, is driving modernisation efforts as part of its enterprise data strategy, to deliver data across the business at scale, at speed and in a secure manner. “We have a lot of data duplicated across different systems, subject matter expertise had become scarce over time, and the business started experiencing outages and incidents that impacted our internal teams and customers.”

Instead of attempting to improve the older systems, NAB has chosen a greenfield approach in Project Ada, built on Fivetran and Databricks on AWS, enabling the bank to standardise on these technologies, driving scale and cost efficiencies across the organisation. 

Fivetran cuts data ingestion costs by 50%

NAB introduced Fivetran to ingest over 200 siloed data sources to a Databricks lakehouse. Instead of nightly batch processing, this new approach allowed for real-time data replication, significantly reducing data and storage costs. Fivetran’s change data capture (CDC) functionality played a crucial role in the new design. 

“We're seeing reductions in terms of cloud, processing and storage costs. Within the first year, we've seen ingestion costs fall by about 50 percent.”
— Joanna Gurry, Executive of Data Platforms at NAB

Gurry also notes a 30% increase in the performance of machine learning models and ad hoc SQL queries. NAB considers Fivetran’s Hybrid Deployment will become part of the cloud-hosted platform, while processing its sensitive data in NAB’s own secure environment.

“With Fivetran's new Hybrid Deployment, there is the potential to achieve an all-in-one platform that helps us scale data movement while keeping our most sensitive data safe,” Gurry adds. “This model will allow us to unlock additional value and securely move our sensitive data to Databricks, so we can enrich it and drive insights without data leaving our own secure environment.” 

Unlocking NAB’s data across the enterprise

With real-time access to data, NAB is focused on personalising the customer experience, scaling financial crime detection and AI-powered workstreams. Key initiatives include: 

• Banker chat assistant: Using generative AI models to scan documents in knowledge repositories quickly in support of customer queries, improving customer service with the best available information. 
• Financial crime detection: Deploying graph databases to monitor fund flows and detect anomalies.
• Refining campaigns: Using GenAI to tailor campaigns and communication to each customer's personality type.
• AI-led document review: Cutting review time for 15,000 annual trust deeds from 45 minutes to five minutes, saving an estimated 10,000 hours annually. 

“Our strategies for supporting financial crime detection and real-time personalisation, including the adoption of generative AI, require real-time data,” Gurry says. Fivetran enables us to provide the best customer experience with fresh, reliable and compliant data.”

Future-ready with a modular architecture

NAB’s modular architecture with Fivetran and Databricks helps drive agility and responsiveness to future technological advancements. This positions NAB as an industry leader, ready to harness the full potential of data to drive innovation and deliver superior customer experiences.

As NAB continues to innovate and evolve, its commitment to leveraging high-quality, always-on data will undoubtedly keep it at the forefront of the banking industry, setting new benchmarks for excellence and customer satisfaction.

Download this IDC report to learn how Fivetran drives millions in financial impact and enables new business initiatives for enterprises.