NAB brings in HSBC engineering exec to lead new function

NAB has set up a new function called ‘emerging tech and engineering acceleration’ in its architecture team, led by a former HSBC software engineering executive.

The bank confirmed to iTnews that Joao (Joe) Alves had joined as the executive of emerging tech and engineering acceleration from this month.

Alves announced his appointment in a brief LinkedIn post last week.

He was previously based in London with HSBC, first as global middleware engineering strategy senior manager and then as the global head of hybrid integration platform architecture, for a combined seven years.

Before that, he was vice president for technology infrastructure at Goldman Sachs in Brazil.

NAB said Alves “has been working in the distributed systems space for over 26 years.”

“Joe has been enabling enterprises to leverage open technologies since the early days of commercial Internet, and most recently with the Kubernetes-based cloud native stacks,” a NAB spokesperson told iTnews.

“He has been a Google Anthos customer design partner since the suite was announced at Google Next 2018, helping to influence the product stack, and providing requirements and continuous feedback across the product suite.”

NAB added Google to its multi-cloud mix in September 2019, also indicating at the time that it was interested in Anthos, a hybrid cloud solution that, among other features, allows users to manage workloads running on other clouds like AWS and Azure.

More broadly, NAB confirmed that emerging tech and engineering acceleration “is a new function at NAB, tasked with leveraging modern and emerging technologies and standardising pattern automation across the group.

“The function will work as part of NAB’s broader architecture team to optimise the use of technology for driving efficiencies, innovation and agility; translating to better experiences for customers,” it said.