Product descriptions:
National Australia Bank (NAB), Australia’s second-largest bank, with a market cap of more than $100 billion, and serves more than 10 million customers. As data became central to everything from enhancing customer experience to regulatory compliance requirements, NAB faced mounting challenges and inefficiencies from a decades-old Teradata warehouse. To overcome these obstacles, NAB made a decisive move to modernise its data strategy and to adopt a Lakehouse architecture.
By decommissioning its heritage platform and migrating 95% of critical workloads for reporting, analytics and machine learning onto Databricks SQL, NAB has equipped over 1,200 users with governed, real-time analytics, ushering in a new era of operational performance, resiliency, and business innovation.
Retiring a heritage platform to meet modern banking demands
For more than two decades, NAB’s Teradata platform formed the backbone of its data and reporting environment for much of the business, supporting thousands of daily data feeds, nearly a thousand use cases, and over 140 reporting suites. As the system aged, it was no longer suitable or fit for modern purposes to support business processes, timely regulatory reporting, and critical customer services. It was experiencing regular delays in batch processing, and many incidents put compliance and customer commitments at risk.
“Teradata was at the heart of many of NAB’s most important customer and business processes for decades,” said Joanna Gurry, Data Platforms Executive at NAB. “But supporting it was draining resources and limiting our ability to innovate at the pace we required to deliver for our customers.”
Decommissioning the Teradata platform was both a technical necessity and a business imperative. Locked-in operational logic, custom business rules, and legacy applications had become deeply embedded in day-to-day banking services, regulatory reports, and even customer support. The path forward required unraveling thousands of dependencies, preserving data lineage and compliance, and ensuring the transition had zero negative impact on customers or the bank’s regulatory requirements.
The program's scale and ambition were significant, even for NAB. Rather than lift and shift outdated designs, the data and analytics team saw the opportunity to completely rethink how data could serve the business. Their vision: build for the future, prioritizing real-time pipelines, better data quality, and a shift from ad hoc batch extracts to governed, resilient, and self-service analytics for the next generation of banking.
Modernizing analytics for scale, speed, and governance
NAB’s new data platform, known internally as “Ada,” was purpose-built on Databricks, with Databricks SQL at the foundation of its modernization journey. Instead of duplicating the old environment, NAB’s data team mapped the current business and reporting needs, allowing them to rationalize legacy reports and focus on what truly delivered value. By leveraging Databricks SQL along with Databricks Platform features—Auto Loader for ingestion, Declarative Pipelines for seamless transformation, and Unity Catalog for enterprise-grade lineage, data masking, and access control—they established a future-ready data architecture underpinned by DBSQL.
The shift to Databricks SQL wasn’t just a technology swap; it transformed how the business consumes and acts on data. For example, NAB’s product analytics teams previously had to wait for overnight batch reports to refresh—delays that slowed campaign launches and complicated decision-making. By rebuilding these reporting suites as DBSQL pipelines, the team gave users access to fresh insights via Power BI dashboards. Now, business leaders can explore current product metrics and iterate rapidly, and reporting cycles that once took hours or days are available on demand. “The migration wouldn’t have been possible without Databricks SQL,” explained Gurry... “It provides the performance and governance our reporting teams required, while letting us automate data pipelines at enterprise scale. We replaced lengthy overnight processes with robust, observable pipelines that our users trust.”
Managing such a complex migration required deep technical rigor and careful change leadership. NAB’s teams built medallion architecture data flows, implemented asset bundles for continuous integration and deployment of machine learning, and designed operational dashboards so business users could monitor every data load. User enablement became a priority: Over 1,200 business and technical staff were migrated to Databricks SQL and best practices for the new platform have been an area of focus for building new skills and stronger data literacy.
The transformation did not come without challenges, but Databricks’ modular releases, comprehensive observability, and unified governance enabled NAB to move at a pace and level of confidence unmatched by previous migrations. Today, the bank leverages DBSQL for speed and automation and as a trusted backbone for transparency and control, empowering teams across the organization to deliver data-driven value in ways that were difficult before.
From resilience to innovation with a unified data foundation
The business impact of the transformation has been game-changing across NAB. Today, the workloads and reporting from Teradata have been migrated—safeguarding regulatory compliance and uninterrupted business processes, while elevating analytics to a new level of reliability and speed. Previously, the organization relied on a patchwork of legacy reports and manual data extracts, but now core workloads deliver improved uptime, stronger data governance, and significantly faster turnaround. Proactive monitoring and greater transparency for users help drive faster remediation of any data problems. "With Databricks SQL, we unlocked the next era of self-service and trusted data for our business," said Gurry.. "Our teams—from compliance and fraud to marketing and customer insights—now move faster and more confidently, asking new questions and delivering value at a level that wasn’t possible before."
Beyond efficiency, the migration reshaped NAB’s data culture into one defined by shared standards, governed access, and true cross-functional collaboration. Business and technical teams work together using a unified DBSQL environment, accelerating onboarding, reducing dependency on legacy processes, and empowering users with timely, quality-assured data. Power users and analysts no longer need to wait for lengthy overnight runs—they have on-demand access to strategic insights directly fueling business strategy and innovation.
Perhaps most notably, NAB now operates at a level of agility impossible in the old world. For example, a cross-functional team recently launched a new regulatory dashboard in under a week—a process that had often required several months of coordination and manual development. This rapid delivery has set a new standard for internal responsiveness, allowing business units to respond to customer expectations, business changes, or emerging market needs with near real-time adaptation. As NAB looks ahead, the Databricks SQL warehouse already enables next-generation analytics—like streaming pipelines and leveraging advanced ML—while providing the trusted, scalable foundation for future digital banking innovation. The result: NAB’s approach has enabled a truly modern, resilient, and responsive data platform, serving customers, regulators, and internal teams with greater speed, agility, and confidence in their data than ever before.