Slater moved off NAB’s IT operations

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nab

blog Those among you who are interested in the technology aspect of Australia’s banking sector will have noticed that this morning the National Australia Bank dumped a whole heap of information on the Australian Stock Exchange regarding the progress of its its technology strategy. To put it lightly, this is probably the most information-dense disclosure of a company’s technology strategy I’ve seen for a while, and it will take a while to go through it.

However, probably the most immediately pertinent aspect of the information dump is the news that the bank’s highly regarded group executive of Group Business Services, Gavin Slater, who along with the bank’s former chief information officer Adam Bennett has been overseeing its IT operations for some time, has been moved into a new position on the business side of NAB — group executive of Personal Banking. Also associated with the move is the shift of Lisa Gray. Gray currently holds the position which Slater will be shifting into, but will now switch into the position of group executive, Enterprise Services and Transformation.

So what does this mean?

Well, for a start, it appears to mean that Gray is the new Slater. It appears as though the executive now has responsibility NAB’s internal IT transformation and NextGen core banking re-platforming initiatives. Essentially, it appears as though the pair have switched roles; and it appears as though Bennett (currently NAB executive general manager of Enterprise Transformation) is staying where he is. It looks like this is pretty much a clean swap.

Is this a good thing? For the bank in general, yes. It doesn’t appear from her LinkedIn profile that Gray has any direct experience with banking IT operations, but then neither did Slater before he took up the role, from what I can see. Plus, with Bennett sitting under her and a plethora of other senior IT executives around such as the bank’s CTO Denis McGee, it’s hard to imagine that things are going to go that wrong. This is the kind of executive movement which major organisations such as banks love to conduct; swapping around top leaders so that they get experience across a broad swathe of the bank’s operations. It creates a very solid pool of potential chief executives and divisional heads.

With respect to the huge amount of other information which the bank released this morning regarding its IT projects and operations, that’ll take a while to sift through to understand it. I’ll have an article on that later this week; plus I’m still working on a broader piece about its datacentre transformation. Looks like it’s going to be a NAB week ;)

Image credit: Delimiter, NAB

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