The decommissioning of the old credit risk engine comes as NAB completes the latest upgrade to its Information Analytics Platform, which has broadened the scope of customer and transaction data passing through its processing systems.

NAB chief information officer David Boyle says: “NAB’s credit risk engine is now delivering enhanced risk weighted asset data quality to the bank and is part of a front-to-back NextGen solution, where front-end banking data will pass directly to the consolidated back-end financial, risk and analytics platform."

He says the scrapping of the legacy platform and the 37 servers that supported it will result in a significant drop in maintenance and power consumption.

Strategic and operational benefits are also expected to flow from the new platform. “At a strategic level, a common data layer enables both the credit risk engine and related finance and risk applications, such as funds transfer pricing, collective provisioning and cost allocation, to have the same point of reference for data processing," says Boyle. “At the operational level, the Credit Risk Engine has been able to assimilate and reflect the changes generated externally by Basel III and other regulatory imperatives as well as providing a material improvement in processing times as compared to the legacy platform.”

NextGen is NAB’s project to deliver a new digital-ready real-time core platform using the Oracle Banking Platform as a foundation.

The Treasury, Risk and Finance layer was the first of the four major components of the platform to take shape. The second was the core servicing foundation visible in direct banking subsidiary UBank, with more than 375,000 customer accounts operating on the platform. The third component was the pooling of customer data in the Oracle Customer Hub for improved customer relationship management. The fourth and final component of the banking platform is origination for personal products, with roll out to commence in 2015.