Executive Conversations
As National Australia Bank’s group executive of technology and enterprise operations, Patrick Wright led one of the most ambitious tech transformations in Australian banking. Now he sits down with Bain’s Damian Stephenson to explain how he pulled it off and what he learned.
NAB’s multiyear modernization journey began in a heavily outsourced, vendor-led technology environment. Patrick explains that a lack of trust in technology across the business drove his decision to “take [the] company back.” By building an in-house engineering team, restoring credibility, and delivering early wins, he created the momentum needed to accelerate transformation.
Guided by Patrick’s conviction, NAB made the bold decision in 2018 to move most of its applications to the public cloud. This infrastructure laid the foundation for AI adoption, enterprise scalability, and long-term value for the company, customers, and shareholders. Patrick also shares why NAB chose an “industrialization pathway” to simplify its business and ultimately better serve its customers.
As Patrick puts it, banks essentially do three things: take deposits, make loans, and move money. By relentlessly simplifying the company’s technology function, he aims to cut through complexity and keep teams focused on what matters most. In his view, simplicity enables faster responses to customer needs and the speed required to outperform competitors.
NAB’s evolution from a vendor-led organization to one firmly in control of its own direction was just the beginning. Looking ahead, Patrick’s vision for the next decade is centered on continuous improvement. Rather than resting on its reputation as a technology leader, the company is focused on doing more with less, freeing up capital to invest in customer outcomes, and delivering greater value with speed.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: I'm Damian Stephenson. I lead Bain's enterprise technology practice in Asia-Pacific. Today, I'm in Melbourne, Victoria, with Patrick Wright, group executive of technology and enterprise operations at NAB. Patrick, thanks for taking the time. Since 2017, Patrick's been on a multi-year modernization journey. Do you remember what stood out to you most about the technology environment at the time when you joined the bank?
PATRICK WRIGHT: I think a few things. First of all, it was very heavily outsourced. There were lots of vendors, but surprisingly--not that there's anything necessarily wrong with vendors—it's that they were in charge, so they were setting the direction; they were setting the tone; they were deciding what products to install. They were driving the technology business. It wasn't being driven by the people, the employees of NAB.
And second thing, I think, is there was a lack of trust. So the business really viewed technology as a broken, modestly dysfunctional part of the company. One of the first things that I knew I needed to do was, as I said back at the time, [I] need to take our company back and just take it back and be in control of our own destiny, set our own direction, hire our own engineers, and build a culture of people who want to create great technical solutions for our customers.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: Was it different than you expected, I guess? Was it surprising in that regard? Or was it kind of the brief that you expected to come into?
PATRICK WRIGHT: I think I lacked the imagination to know how much work really was required. The raging fire at the time was incidents.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: Yeah.
PATRICK WRIGHT: We had to put that out because it was consuming so much of management’s and the business's and our customers' time that it was a massive distraction just making progress on the things we needed to do to run the business better. I needed to just calm the temperature down and get us to a place where we could focus. We needed a few wins on the board.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: Yeah.
PATRICK WRIGHT: Because of distrust with the business, they needed to see that we were serious, that we were capable of getting stuff done, and that we would persevere through obstacles and issues to do what they needed to do. So I did spend a lot of time on that as well, because you have to get credibility with the business so that you get the oxygen to really work on the more difficult issues.
I think the first thing is, we all want to do lots of things, but you have to earn the right to do them. And so I think very early on in a role, you've got to really bring to the table things that, in essence, pay dividends quickly to the business.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: It didn't take you long, while all that was going on, to really start to lean into maybe some of the kind of longer-term future-back type decisions around the architecture and around the infrastructure.
PATRICK WRIGHT: Yeah.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: I think back to, I guess it was, 2018 where you were obviously a pretty early and heavy proponent of a multi-cloud, public cloud strategy at that time. Can you talk to us a little bit about your reflections on that decision and the stance you took at that time and why you felt so strongly?
PATRICK WRIGHT: Yeah, I've been doing a lot of work with cloud in my previous roles and knew the cloud providers pretty well. And I came to a conclusion a few years before I arrived here that the future was going to be in that direction. And so I just felt like it was a better use of our company's time to leverage their capabilities and our company's capital to leverage their capital, and to flip from a capital-intensive model to a cost-intensive model, to be able to harvest the engineering disciplines that they had for my company. And so I just felt like that was the future.
So I spent quite a bit of time with the management team and the board at the time, getting them comfortable with that direction. And then, we ultimately made the decision in September of 2018 to be a public cloud company. Why would we do it when no one else is doing it? Well, sometimes you have to lead.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: Do you remember, at the time, some of the other bold choices you made? I guess, particularly around the kind of infrastructure architecture part of your remit that sort of went in parallel with that decision.
PATRICK WRIGHT: I fundamentally believe in a few things. Like, if we're going to do it, let's do it right. And we chose an industrialization pathway as our initial way of doing things. And I think that allowed us to lay some very long-term foundations that are still paying dividends today. Like, we're going to have one customer master for the entire company. One. Not two, not five, not six, not one by business. We're going to have one. And we [needed] people who actually knew how to build and run systems to be our employees.
I think being 92% in the cloud positions us in a way that I think other companies would be envious of now. Because all of this compute is in the cloud for AI. And because that's where it can scale. I think it's a path that is harder, but will create long-term value for the company and the shareholders and the customers ultimately.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: You're touching on the principle of simplification and the ambition to be a much simpler company as well as being more customer-obsessed. As you said, it's a harder thing to achieve. Why do you think it's so hard to simplify the business in the way it needs to be simplified?
PATRICK WRIGHT: Without being cute or funny, it's [that] everyone thinks they're different or special. And it's just human nature. I think I'm a pretty special guy. I'm sure you look in the mirror and think the same thing, Damian. But if you pull all the way back, all the way back, banks do three things. They take deposits. They make loans. They move money. That's it. And if you just boil it down to those three things, there really aren't that many differences. Most of them are manufactured. Many of them get overcome by the cloud. But today, they don't. And so we can overcome many of those "differences" with technology today. And I think that's the future of getting this right-- is ruthless simplification, ruthless simplicity, and really boiling the activities that we do down to those three basic activities-- deposit gathering, loan making, and moving money.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: As you think about the next 10 years, are there other places where you would like NAB or you would like NAB's technology function to be bolder or more ambitious, or do you feel like the path is now fairly well set based on what you've just described?
PATRICK WRIGHT: I think simplicity is the future. And it's peeling an onion, actually, because as soon as you simplify one bit, you see another bit of noise in the signal. And so I think it's a long-term journey to simplify. And so you have to be quite diligent about it. And when you're done simplifying this particular part of the stack, it becomes obvious what other complexity might now be lying below that.
And so I think it's a long-term journey. But I do believe the companies that can achieve massive simplification will win because we'll win with speed. So we'll be much more responsive to our customers' needs, and then really invest and love those products well and make them brilliant for our customers.
DAMIAN STEPHENSON: Anything as you look ahead now 10 years--we've talked a little bit about the important priorities that you see for the bank. Any big goal you would have for technology over that time frame?
PATRICK WRIGHT: Yeah. Andrew's vision of creating the most customer-centric company in Australia and New Zealand is a big one. He didn't say "bank." He said "company." And it's a massively ambitious agenda. And I think in the 21st century, technology is a huge part of that. And so we have to rise to that occasion as technology leaders and take outages seriously, take customer value seriously, take delivery on time, ahead of budget, for less money seriously so that we can go faster at getting our systems to a place that delights our customers.
I think we have a lot of work to do that because like most financial services companies, we have a lot of legacy. Even today, with this huge journey we've made to get to the cloud, our technology is decaying naturally all the time. And so there's always going to be things to work on and things to refresh. And we have to find ways to do more with less and to free up capital so that we can invest more in customer outcomes.
And we've pivoted from a company that was trapped, for lack of a better term, with vendors that were telling him what to do into a company that's fully in charge of its resources, setting its own direction and deciding how it wants to run itself.
This transcript was automatically generated.