NAB declares data centre migration complete

National Australia Bank has declared its long-running data centre migration complete, announcing it has fully moved into its Deer Park facility in Melbourne.

NAB first detailed its plans to consolidate 23 ageing data centres nationwide down to just two in 2013.

The efforts formed part of a drive to reduce data centre power consumption and save $22 million over seven years.

The end result means NAB will operate solely out of its leased Digital Realty facility in Deer Park - which was opened in 2013 - and its existing Knox, Victoria data centre.

Tim Palmer, the man leading NAB’s data centre transformation, previously labelled the two facilities “fortress data centres”: Tier 3 facilities that would hold core critical customer data and customer-facing systems.

In its annual results today, NAB CEO Andrew Thorburn declared the migration to Deer Park complete, with 1000 business applications and 3500 virtual and physical servers shifted to the facility last month.

NAB last month decommissioned its data centre in East Melbourne, which was built in the 1970s.

The bank is now processing $250 billion in transactions through Deer Park daily.

NAB's head of enterprise services and transformation Renée Roberts yesterday said Deer Park was 50 percent more energy efficient than the East Melbourne data centre.

“It also has a state-of-the-art air cooling system that doesn’t use a single drop of water, which has led to a 97 percent reduction in water use,” she said.

It is unclear whether the bank has completely moved out of all its previous 23 data centres and whether those facilities have been decommissioned. NAB has been contacted for clarification.

NAB engaged IBM to supply managed infrastructure services at the Deer Park facility in 2012. The deal allowed NAB to only pay for what it uses, by better managing server loads and scaling infrastructure during peak demand.

The bank's Australian occupancy-related expenses grew by 4 percent to $31 million for the year thanks to the move into the new data centre, as well as increased property rental costs.

Personal banking origination pilot in full swinng

NAB's ongoing technology transformation also saw the pilot of a new personal banking origination platform this year.

The platform is used when new personal banking customers apply for anything from loans to credit cards, insurance or term deposits.

It is designed to cut down on the need for paper documents, and will allow customers to upload and submit documents online, track their application progress and receive updates via SMS.

The bank in August announced it had debuted the platform and was processing a "small" number of applications in a live environment.

NAB today revealed the platform was currently being trialled in South Australian and Northern Territory branches and contact centres, ahead of a full rollout next year to more than 14,000 staff.

It said its case studies had shown credit card applications could be processed through to conditional approval in seven minutes, and a new deposit account for existing customers could be opened in less than two minutes.

The personal banking origination platform project made up the majority of the bank's investment in infrastructure projects during the most recent financial year.

NAB spent $703 million on infrastructure projects this past fiscal year, 12 percent less than FY14 due the completion of major transformation projects like the Oracle-based customer master.

The Oracle-based NAB View allows its bankers to access a single view of a customer's interactions with the bank and centralises 135 million customer records. The rollout was completed in May.

NAB's net profit for the fiscal year rose almost 20 percent to$6.34 billion.