National Australia Bank uses Cursor to speed up migration of outdated computer systems, cutting manual coding work

National Australia Bank (NAB), Australia's largest bank by assets, adopted Cursor—an AI-powered code editor—to accelerate the process of replacing old, hard-to-maintain software systems with modern ones. The bank is using AI to automatically translate or rewrite legacy code (the aging programs that run critical banking infrastructure) rather than doing it by hand.

Cursor uses AI to understand existing code and suggest rewrites, reducing the time engineers spend manually decoding decades-old systems. For migration projects that traditionally take months of line-by-line human translation, this compression of effort means fewer engineer-months burned on grunt work and faster project timelines.

For software engineers at large banks and financial institutions, this signals that AI coding assistants are now trusted for high-stakes infrastructure work—not just feature development. It also means job pressure: roles centered on manually migrating old systems are becoming less defensible, while skills in directing and validating AI-assisted migrations are becoming more valuable.