News

National Australia Bank ends CRM project at ATMs

February 28, 2005

Australian IT: The National Australia Bank has delayed introducing several planned improvements to its customer relationship management system as it strives to recover ground after last year's $360 million (U.S. $284 million) foreign exchange scandal and subsequent executive shakeup.

The bank has shifted its priorities from improving its National Leads CRM system to projects that will help integrate systems.

An ATM trial that ran for about eight months will not continue, said Australian cross-marketing and CRM head Charles Lawoko. "We have put a hold on deploying that in a large way because we have to consider costs and we would need to upgrade some of our ATMs."

To get "true benefits" the bank would need to upgrade several components of its ATM infrastructure before it was fully introduced, Lawoko said.

"We have proven we can do it from a technology perspective. You can pilot this with a few machines, but if you want to go nationwide you need to look at the infrastructure and the question becomes a little more complex."

Lawoko declined to comment on whether the bank was still investigating possibilities for its other channels.

National Leads was initially deployed in Australia in early 1999, and since then the Siebel-based software and NCR Teradata database has been extended to New Zealand. Lawoko declined to comment on how much the bank had spent on the CRM system.