MLC Reviews

Mainframe technology and a website that's barely functional. No mobile app! Thirty years of bandaid fixes and manual workarounds with our technology makes implementing change a game of jenga. 105 Miller is overcrowded. Good luck finding an available meeting room. If I arrive later than 9:15am I'll miss out on a flexi-desk and have to sit in the naughty corner on another floor away from my team. The culture has been going downhill ever since the AVIVA integration a few years back. Most large projects are delivered 10 years too late. MLC only recently moved their banking from Westpac to nab (nab bought MLC in 2000). Dealing with the offshore technology Help Desk can cause chest pains.

1. Top level management are all very old school - traditionalists whom does not understand how to run MLC Life as a technology company, which leads to point #2 below. 2. Technology execs are not technical and more importantly, are not forward thinking - the new CITO is from another bank, the CIO, and next in lines are all his (CITO) friends who runs banks, old-school way. Nepotism is the way to go there it seems now. 3. Quite a few Technology Platform Managers are not technical at all. How do you manage a technology platform if you're not technical? 4. Outsourced responsibilities - MLC Life's processes & governance are all designed to put the blame on specific person. As a result, no one dares to assume accountability. The outcome? Everything is outsourced - so if something goes wrong, it's the 3rd party's problem. Or internally, there'll be layers upon layers of sign offs, so everyone blames everyone when things go wrong. 5. Governance - it's all just paperwork - top level management only cares about what's on paper, not what is actually done. It's a house of cards there not necessarily due to worker's doings but the top level management's attitude. The problem is, they're always covered when it comes to accountability - they never get the blame. It's always the ones they ask to do the dirty that gets it. 6. Sanagi funding - all the funds goes to external contractors in the millions that gets squandered but most internal teams have none (depends on who you know). Sad - it's like the kids of the family don't get any money from their parents, but they would give it to their friends. I honestly do not understand how this works. 7. The most ridiculous part of all - it's all politics and who yells the loudest there. If you sound like you know what you're doing, you get points. If you yell louder than others, you get points and if you know the higher ups, you get points.