Tom McMeekin

Explore how National Australia Bank (NAB) adopted Databricks Serverless across notebooks, jobs, declarative pipelines, SQL Warehouses and Model Serving—delivering platform reliability, cost efficiency and performance without compromising security or governance. Hear NAB’s blueprint: phased migration, workload prioritization and cross‑team operationalization. Learn the essentials—Unity Catalog for fine‑grained governance, plus Private Link and Secure Egress Gateway for private connectivity—and hard‑won lessons from uplifting Spark to declarative pipelines (DLT/LDP), moving SQL to serverless warehouses, and operationalizing model serving with observability and guardrails. Walk away with actionable patterns, checklists and success criteria for regulated environments. Outcomes include broad serverless adoption, faster MLOps cycles, better SQL performance, lower ingestion cost and sustained query scale—a pragmatic path to bank‑grade serverless at enterprise scale.

In this session, discover how National Australia Bank (NAB) is reshaping its data and AI strategy by positioning data as a strategic enabler. Driven by a vision to unlock data like electricity—continuous and reliable—NAB has established a scalable foundation for data intelligence that balances agility with enterprise-grade control. We'll delve into the key architectural, security, and governance capabilities underpinning this transformation, including Unity Catalog, Serverless, Lakeflow and GenAI. The session will highlight NAB's adoption of Databricks Serverless, platform security controls like private link, and persona-based data access patterns. Attendees will walk away with practical insights into building secure, scalable, and cost-efficient data platforms that fuel innovation while meeting the demands of compliance in highly regulated environments.