NAB Treasury Tech Head Out In Bid To Focus On Implementation

National Australia Bank's head of group treasury technology, Stuart Mackenzie, has left the company. His departure is part of an effort by the bank to pick up the pace of implementation of new systems. As part of a project known at the bank as Lazarus, NAB is engaged in a sweeping overhaul of its treasury systems, including the deployment of an integrated front-to-back office treasury system built using Infinity Financial Technologies' toolkit and class libraries.

In the wake of Mackenzie's departure, NAB is refocusing its treasury technology organisation, bank officials say. According to the bank's spokesperson, the new group will be headed by Donald McDonald, who was previously managing technology in another part of the bank. McDonald becomes head of NAB's treasury systems and technology.

To spearhead the Lazarus project, NAB has engaged Ian Coward as Lazarus program director. He joins from Aspect Software Services, where he was a consulting manager. Coward had been acting as group head until Mackenzie's replacement was named. He will now report to McDonald. Earlier in his career, Coward had worked for Logica, which until early last year (D&IS, 19 June, 1995) had rights to market in Australia the Tibco Teknekron Information Bus digital data distribution platform in use at NAB (D&IS, 27 March, 1995).

"Stuart [Mackenzie] was an ideas-type man who we brought in two years ago to develop our strategy going forward," says Haydn Park, NAB's spokesperson. "His strategic role has finished, in terms of conceptualizing. We've now entered an era where we need to implement those plans and bring in business management, administrative control...someone who could project manage in terms of the transition from existing systems.

"We needed to bring in expertise where [Mackenzie] doesn't have the skills: in implementation," Park says. "I don't mean that in a negative way, he simply has skills in another arena."

The bank's blueprint called for a suite of position-keeping and risk management systems to be built internally using Infinity's software kernel and other development tools. The integrated front-to-back office system would eventually replace the wide variety of existing systems Development work on the new systems was to be done in C++ to run under Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system on Sun Sparc servers and desktop workstations.

NAB also planned to build an interface to allow data, including real-time market prices, to be delivered to the Infinity-based applications via the bank's TIB data delivery platform, which also runs on Sun workstations and servers.

Although it does involve a large-scale overhaul of existing systems, NAB's approach to the Lazarus project was not intended to be Big Bang-like, a bank source says. Instead, the bank has adopted an iterative phased implementation schedule, focusing on releasing applications required to give the bank a complete picture of its global risk first. Due to the size and scope of the Lazarus effort, NAB officials say they also expect some technology decisions to be reviewed at interim stages during the life of the project.

The rollout schedule called for NAB's technologists to deliver an FX deal capture application and a market risk system in the fourth quarter of 1995, Mackenzie told D&IS last April (D&IS, 10 April, 1995).

Neither is yet ready to roll, and sources say NAB currently plans to use a customized version of an off-the-shelf product from Reuters-owned Sailfish Systems for market risk measurement and management. The Sailfish-based risk system is among three portions of the Lazarus project that are set for imminent deployment, according to a bank source. The others are a global deals database that will accept position information input from the bank's variety of existing position-keeping systems and a global communications system.

The FX deal capture system, which was to be built using Infinity's toolkit, has entered acceptance testing and is expected to be ready for rollout in Melbourne around mid-year, according to NAB sources.

According to one source, the delays in delivery of the FX deal capture system were a cause for some concern by bank managers, who were keen to see the pace of subsequent development efforts quickened.

Until the new integrated system is complete, the bank will continue to rely on a fairly wide selection of systems to support its dealing operations worldwide. These include Midas-Kapiti International FS-Dealer for deal capture, MKI's Cmark and Equation back-office systems, Reuters' Global Limit Control System and Sungard Capital Markets' Devon Derivatives System.

In London, NAB last year completed the first phase of a project apparently designed to facilitate communication among the bank's disparate front-, middle- and back-office systems. The effort appeared designed to tide the bank over through the interim stage until the new integrated system was ready (D&IS, 20 November, 1995). That project entails forming links between the FS-Dealer deal-capture application and the bank's Global Limit Control System. The interfaces were written for NAB London by Oxford-based Rand Information Systems.

At the time, NAB sources told D&IS sister publication Risk Management Operations that they didn't expect the integrated Infinity-based system to be ready until some time in 1998, 1999 or the year 2000. These sources also said they expected the suite of interim interfaces would be deployed in other NAB offices worldwide.

Separately, NAB manager Jeff Lee, who spearheaded the bank's rollout of TIB and other dealing room systems, has been recruited by IBM Australia as a senior representative.

The bank will continue to maintain its sizeable treasury technology group in Australia, which numbers over 150 staff, according to one source. Last April, Mackenzie said some 30 staff were devoted full-time to the Lazarus project. The spokesperson declines to furnish a precise figure for the group's headcount, but says no reduction is planned.

Mackenzie joined NAB as group head in treasury technology in January 1993, the spokesperson says. Previously, Mackenzie had held the senior treasury technology position at State Bank of New South Wales in Sydney. Mackenzie joined State Bank in London in 1982 and relocated to Australia in 1988 to work at the bank's headquarters.

Under Mackenzie's stewardship, State Bank formed its plans to deploy a Unix-based digital data distribution platform, also from Tibco, the software vendor then known as Teknekron Software Systems, and to develop a number of dealing applications internally.

At NAB, Mackenzie was charged with drafting a blueprint for a new dealing room platform and associated applications to replace the wide variety of systems used by the bank to support different products in different dealing centres.

In 1993, during Mackenzie's first year at NAB, the bank opted to purchase a license for the TIB. At the bank's suggestion, Tibco, then called Teknekron, opened a sales and support office in Australia. NAB later cut over to the new information system in its 110-position Melbourne dealing room in 1994. That dealing room featured Sun Sparc-5 and Classics on dealers' desks (D&IS, 27 March, 1995). The bank subsequently deployed a similar system at its 60-position London office last year (D&IS, 10 April).