NAB has today announced the appointment of Natalie Lockwood as chief marketing officer (Executive, Group Marketing).
Ms Lockwood joins NAB from Visa where she has most recently been vice president brand and marketing for Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific for the last three years.
NAB Group chief operating officer Les Matheson said: “Natalie is an accomplished marketing leader with over 20 years’ experience working in the financial services and payments industry, both in Australia and around the globe.
“It’s clear Natalie is passionate about delivering for customers and we’re looking forward to her bringing her vast global experiences and insights to help us make NAB the bank of choice for as many Australians as possible.”
Lockwood said: “I’m really excited about joining NAB, one of Australia’s most well-known brands and helping to deliver great experiences for NAB’s customers.
“NAB has more than 10 million customers so the ability to positively impact the lives of so many people every day through the experiences they see and feel is something I look forward to most. NAB has a bold customer-centric ambition and I’m looking forward to working with the team on how we deliver a truly great experience for NAB’s customers.”
Lockwood replaces Suzana Ristevski who joined Google earlier this year. Both were featured in B&T’s CMO Power List.
When Ristevski departed NAB, she told B&T that she was “very sad to be leaving the wonderful team at NAB, but I’m incredibly excited to be joining such an amazing company in Google”.
Lockwood will have big shoes to fill. As Ristevski told B&T earlier this year:
“When I started, we walked into a Royal Commission, trust was at the lowest levels that it had ever been and awareness for Gen Z was dropping significantly,” she explained.
“It was kind of dire. Part of it was NAB itself but it affected all the financial services institutions. And then we had COVID and rate increases.”
She also led NAB on a remarkable journey of martech improvements, saying “Over the last three years, we’ve swapped out 95 per cent of all the marketing tools and technology that we use to drive personalisation.
“We’ve introduced a decision engine and customer data platform to deliver 500 million customised and wonderful customer experiences.
“We can pre-empt when a customer is likely to be hit with fraudulent activity and be able to communicate with them through all of our channels. We’ve also used AI to open the opportunity for NAB to communicate through various channels proactively and service our customers well.”
