NAB's IT meltdowns a wake-up call: CGU

National Australia Bank's (NAB) payments processing meltdowns were a "wake-up call" for the financial services community, a technology conference has been told.

"It is a wake-up call," said CGU Insurance Australia chief information officer (CIO) Ian Frew.

Banks, insurers and others in the sector were always implementing large-scale business changes simultaneously and NAB's outages partly reflected poor processes, he said.

"It comes down to your change management processes - whether you have fully tested them ... and that you have the ability to not only deploy them, but to also pull them back very quickly if something has gone wrong."

Frew was referring to NAB's payments processing meltdowns in November 2010 and April this year that left millions of employees without their pay.

He was speaking at FST Media's fifth annual Technology & Innovation - the Future of Banking and Financial Services conference in Melbourne on Tuesday.

The faults in NAB's overnight batch settlement systems affected customers of most Australian banks who transacted to and from NAB accounts.

It also hit customers of HSBC Australia, Citi and Macquarie Group, which use NAB for clearing and settlement services.

The November outage paralysed payments, EFTPOS and ATM systems for more than a week.

"We've certainly taken some learnings out of the last six months," NAB's head of mobile and emerging technologies, Ben Forsyth, said at the conference.

"We've seen similar problems across the big four in that period as well.

"The reality is that when you're dealing with the volumes that we're now putting through these systems, there will be instances where you have some kind of problem.

"It's how the organisation responds to those problems that is the differentiator."

He said NAB's response was robust, with the organisation pulling together to assist and communicate with customers, and ensure losses were reimbursed.

"There was an undying commitment to make sure none of our customers were out of pocket as a result of that."

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