1.0 Introduction

National Australia Bank (NAB) is among the biggest four financial institutions operating in Australian financial industry and have proven its expertise in digital innovation. NAB is not only renowned into the Australian financial market but it is 17^th largest financial institution considering the global markets. NAB is considered to be as the most innovative bank which has implemented digital innovation for the consumers in order to develop the modern banking techniques (Christensen, 2000). Digital innovations into the banking domain represents the mobile banking, internet banking, innovation in processes & procedures and maintain information systems in the bank which are highly advance in nature and support banking transactions.

The aim of the present paper is to discuss the implementation of digital innovation in the context of National Australia Bank (NAB), further present report would dwell into process & procedure considerations in order to implement the digital innovation in National Australia Bank. Present report would also discuss the potential risk which can be faced by NAB during implementation of the digital innovation in the bank. Finally,cost considerations for the digital innovation project along with probable issues in the digital innovation for the present context would be discussed in detail.

2.0 Process and procedural consideration

Banking systems are abide by the process and procedures which are governed by the central banking bodies, in order to implement proposed digital innovation for NAB it is important that the processes & procedure followed are made flexible so that digital innovation can be easily adopted by the organization with flexible processes accommodating the changes at early stage of the implementation (Tushman & Anderson, 1986). Business processes re-engineering to be implemented in the organization so that with the technological changes in the bank there can be suitable processes which can be re-aligned with the technological changes. Entire information architecture, as well as processes, , need to be reviewed and synchronization needs to be established between the technology and processes. Wherever there is the requirement for change in processes, suitable change management needs to be adopted in order to modify processes to make them compatible with the technological changes implemented in the organization. But at the times when technological changes are so complex that processes can’t be re-aligned with the technological changes and it is not possible to bypass the process & procedure hence in such situations technological change needs to be made which would resolve the issue of compatibility.

A well framed document needs to be prepared in order to create awareness among customers and employees of the organization regarding processes & procedure followed in the bank. Further strict implementation of the processes and procedure would ensure the timely and accurate working for the banking transactions and minimize the risk with efficiency enhancement (Francis, 2012). A timely review of the bank’s processes & policies should be done in order to understand the issues faced by the bank staff and customers to follow the processes. A simplistic view of the processes needs to be developed so as to give added comfort to the customers of the bank.

With implementation of the digital innovation in NAB there would be several customer issues & staff issues arising time to time. So it is important to develop the faster problem resolution processes so as to handle staff & customer query at faster pace. Further processes and procedures followed by the bank post implementation of the digital innovation should be such that manual processes & procedures are removed from the bank and automation is being taken over in all working of the banks. Automation in processes & procedure would give risk to high degree of synchronization for the bank (Smits, 2002).

3.0 Potential implementation risk

There are a set of risk to which implementation of digital innovation in NAB is exposed off, these potential risks contains the below mentioned:

Information security risk:Information security risk is the major risk confronted by the bank as information systems contains financial data which is of high importance for all and during the implementation of newly devised digital equipments there are chances that information security threats can arise in the overall implementation plan.

Data loss:Data loss is another risk which is confronted by NAB as during the implementation of digital innovation entire data transfer would happen from the legacy systems to newly developed systems hence data can be lost during transition phase (Lohr, 2012).

Time delay:Implementation of the digital innovation in bank has been scheduled with the time bound activities and there are possibilities for the time delay during the implementation as some activities may arise during implementation or some other activities may not perform up to the mark.

Over budgeting:At the start of the project budget would be prepared and actual budget may get in line or can overshoot which would create the resource constraint issues for the bank.

Lack of technical expertise:In banking domain not much of the people working in the bank are technical experts’ hence overall project for the digital innovation would lack in house experts for the digital innovation implementation. Lack of in house technical experts can create implementation issues as there can be future problems arising into the technicalities involved in the project (Wadhwa, 2010).

4.0 Cost considerations

Cost is an important factor in overall implementation of the digital innovation planned for National Australia Bank and cost considerations would be important to know benefits which are made through the implementation of the digital innovation project. Cost benefit would be an important tool which would be carried out in order to understand the monetary and non-monetary benefits which can be gained through the present project against the probable cost which would go into implementation of the digital innovation project. A proper net present value analysis needs to be carried out for next 5 years at least so as to understand the present value of the net benefits arising in the project (Ove, 2000). The major consideration and focus here should be to understand the value of non monetary benefits coming out of the project. Based on the positive net present value of the project entire digital innovation should be accepted commercially. Along with net present value for the benefits derived in present project return on investment and payback situation analysis needs to be carried out. Based on the suitability of the financial modeling developed in order to develop the cost structure for the project decision can be taken on the project acceptance or rejection.

5.0 Issues pertaining to digital innovation

There are several considerations which have been made prior to the finalization of decision for developing digital innovation in organization context but despite of all considerations for the digital innovation project implementation it is recommended as the high risk, high return project for the National Australia Bank. High amount of risk pertaining to the NAB include the investments made by NAB, modifications in processes & policies and reputation loss. Digital innovation project implementation would require high amount of funds being deployed by the bank and this investment would be at stake in case digital innovation project implementation does not go as per the schedule (Danneels, 2004). Further digital innovation project implementation would require high degree of business process re-engineering which would make several modifications into the processes & enabling technology putting so many things at stake in case implementation of the digital innovation project does not get successful. Another major threat for the NAB would be the reputation loss as failure of the digital innovation in the bank would lead to loss of reputation not only among the financial industry but among the high number of client base. This would also confuse the customer base of the bank as frequent changes in the processes & policies would not make it clear for the customers to follow suitable processes & procedure of the bank in order to avail banking services.

Conclusion

The present paper which aimed at exploring the potential threats which would be faced by the bank in order to implement digital innovation in the organization has explore the implementation phenomenon and it has been found out that there are several implementation concerns such as time delay, lack of technicalities and over budgeting. Also cost considerations would play an important role where in cost would be considered through financial modeling.

References

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