Projects
These case studies show how I work and some of the projects I've worked on.
The National Australia Bank (NAB) is one of Australia’s “Big Four” banks and a major provider of home lending and retail banking services. At the time of this engagement, NAB was one of the country’s largest mortgage lenders, serving hundreds of thousands of home loan customers across Australia, with digital origination playing an increasingly central role in its retail strategy.
Mortgage applications sit at a particularly sensitive intersection of customer experience, regulatory compliance, and operational efficiency. Systems supporting them must handle high volumes, complex validation rules, and frequent policy change, while remaining accessible to both customers and internal teams. Even relatively small delivery delays can have outsized commercial and reputational impact.
It was against this backdrop that Oliver Wyman was supporting delivery on a digital initiative for NAB, focused on improving aspects of the bank’s online mortgage application experience.
From April to May 2016, I worked as a front-end developer with Oliver Wyman, helping to stabilise and deliver a project for NAB that had begun to overrun. The engagement was short but intense, with an immediate need to restore delivery confidence and bring the work back under control.
The project involved a small team of around six developers working on a web-based application, built using Angular and Node.js, with a strong emphasis on client-side behaviour, data visualisation, and testability. As with many consultancy-led programmes, the technical challenges were closely intertwined with communication and expectation management.
My role was primarily hands-on, working directly in the Angular codebase while supporting the team in improving clarity and delivery rhythm. This included helping bring structure to front-end components, strengthening automated testing using Jasmine, and ensuring that visual and data-driven elements — such as those built with Highcharts — behaved predictably and were easier to reason about.
Equally important was clear communication with key stakeholders. By making progress visible and framing technical decisions in terms of risk, trade-offs, and user impact, the team was able to reduce friction and focus on what was genuinely required to move the project forward.
While the engagement was brief, it contributed to the project regaining momentum and reaching a point where delivery could continue with greater confidence. The experience reinforced a recurring lesson: in high-pressure financial services environments, progress is rarely blocked by technology alone. Just as often, it depends on clarity, shared understanding, and the ability to translate complex technical work into terms that stakeholders can trust.
