Published: Jul 29, 2025

Transforming banking with data: The Mutual Bank and NCS drive innovation

As champions for the financial wellbeing of its members and the community, The Mutual Bank has been serving local communities in Maitland and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales since 1888. 

As a proud member of the Community Owned Banking Association (COBA), for 130 years The Mutual Bank has continually evolved to meet the changing needs of its members and communities. To do that, the Bank is committed to embracing digital and technology advancements.

By leveraging NCS’s technology services expertise and adopting Microsoft Fabric as their strategic data platform, The Mutual Bank eliminated data silos, reduced duplication, and established a trusted single source of truth to drive sustainable growth and innovation.

“Partnering with NCS to implement Microsoft Fabric has been a strategic milestone for the bank. It established a robust single source of truth, elevated organisational data literacy, and aligned our technical capabilities with broader business objectives, transforming how we leverage data as a strategic asset."

Josh Hessel, Chief Digital and Technology Officer, The Mutual Bank

Common fact: Data provides a foundation to identify opportunity, improve efficiency and gain a competitive edge. Data is an enabler for strategic planning, understanding customer needs, and developing better products and services. 

What The Mutual Bank didn’t lack was data, most of which was stored in their core banking system. Previously, accessing and manipulating that data was a time-consuming, technical, and labour-intensive process, which still required a lot of cleaning up and reformatting before the data could be shared and used for insights and analytics.  

What they needed was a modern data infrastructure to drive their strategic objectives. 

Specifically, the Bank was striving to:

• Address data fragmentation: Their existing data systems were siloed, leading to duplication and a lack of a unified source of truth. This hindered their ability to make reliable, data-driven decisions. 
• Enhance data quality and ownership: They needed to ensure a high degree of data quality and establish clear ownership to improve decision-making and operational efficiency. 
• Enable connected data sources: The Mutual Bank aimed to integrate their data sources securely and efficiently to support seamless reporting and analytics. 
• Improve reporting and analytics: They sought to reduce manual data preparation time and provide business users with self-serve analytics capabilities for quicker and more accurate insights. 

The Mutual Bank’s main question was: How could they drive a data-driven decision-making culture and ensure their data infrastructure could scale to meet future needs? 
 

Together we delivered a transformation initiative to demonstrate The Mutual Bank’s commitment to innovation and growth, and, at the same time, directly benefit its members through improved services, more personalised banking experiences, quicker response times, and more accurate information. 

NCS and The Mutual Bank enhanced data quality, ensured secure and timely data integration, and continue to foster a data-driven decision-making culture across the organisation through self-serve analytics. 

While the intention was to move fast, powered by Microsoft’s Fabric Platform, the solution focused on showcasing business use cases designed to deliver immediate value, while driving early adoption of a data-driven approach. 

A comprehensive solution was implemented incorporating these key components:

• Azure Landing Zone: A secure and scalable Azure Landing Zone was established. This included centralised Azure billing, a configured Microsoft Entra tenant, identity and access management configuration, centralised logs and operations, and an organised management group and subscription structure with defined policy management. 
• Scalable data platform: The architecture leveraged Microsoft Fabric’s cloud-based capabilities to handle current and future data needs, ensuring a robust framework for growth. 
• Data access controls: Measures were implemented to meet stringent information security requirements, ensuring secure access and governance. 
• Enhanced reporting and analytics: Business users were equipped with advanced reporting capabilities to reduce manual data preparation, enabling more informed and efficient decision-making. 

The new and modern platform built on Microsoft Fabric in the cloud will enable regular business, finance and operational staff to access data, interrogate it, easily build dashboards to drive business insights, and inform critical business decisions in a timely manner. 

This solution not only resolved immediate challenges but also laid the foundation for a data-driven culture across the business, ensuring alignment with the Bank’s new Digital, Technology and Data Strategy.
 

“The Microsoft Fabric implementation with NCS accelerated our development of a unified platform, significantly improving data accessibility and governance. This technical foundation will enable the bank to make more informed decisions and drive innovation through data."

Bronte Edwards, Head of Data and Analytics, The Mutual Bank

More Value. Better Quality. Different. 

NCS helped The Mutual Bank to democratise their data, setting up the platform to allow it to be used by the people who need it, to make the decisions that matter; but importantly to do this in a way that is secure, well governed and meets regulatory compliance and data privacy requirements. 

When The Mutual Bank was looking for a seasoned Microsoft partner to guide their Cloud and Data transformation journey, they found NCS. Leveraging our specialised data expertise and strong Microsoft partnership, our collaboration created a foundation for a long-term strategic alliance. This alliance positions The Mutual Bank for scalable innovation.  

By adopting Microsoft Fabric as the foundation of their modern data platform, they’re eliminating silos, reducing duplication, and ensuring a trusted single source of truth that empowers better decision-making and drives sustainable growth. 

When you successfully combine people and process with technology as the enabler, all aimed at meeting strategic objectives – that’s how transformation becomes tangible.