Microsoft has announced a five-year partnership with the National Australia Bank (NAB) to develop and invest in NAB’s and Bank of New Zealand’s multi-cloud technology. The two organizations are looking into ways of identifying customers using facial recognition.
The partnership will see the development of a multi-cloud ecosystem that will host 1,000 of NAB’s apps on Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud service, and other cloud services as the secondary cloud if needed.
“The needs of our customers haven’t changed but their expectations of how we deliver a more personalized service has,” said NAB’s chief of Technology and Enterprise Operations Patrick Wright.
“To deliver for customers, we need to invest in the latest technology, leveraging global leaders like Microsoft to help us bring new services to our customers, quickly and at scale.
“The investment we’ve made in technology to date has built a strong, cloud-first foundation that’s enabled colleagues to execute better and deliver much better experiences for our customers. We’re thrilled to have Microsoft’s support and investment in this partnership, to further shift the bank to the cloud.
“Together, we will improve the resilience of NAB and BNZ banking services and reduce development timelines for system changes and improvements, from six weeks to as little as two days.”
NAB has been looking into biometrics, including behavioral and voice systems. It is already working on a proof of concept to demonstrate how facial recognition could replace the need of a debit card at an ATM. However, a PIN for authentication would still be needed after the face verification.
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