National Australia Bank's online brand, UBank, has reached the milestone of becoming an operating, online banking platform 10 months after the bank introduced the brand to the market.UBank now includes a second banking product, an at-call savings account featuring an impressive, and unsustainable, interest rate of 5.11 per cent. Up until now UBank has offered term deposits, mainly targeted at self managed super funds, serviced by its North Sydney call centre only.NAB has now introduced internet banking functionality. One minor variant in the UBank at-call account is that customers will be able to transfer their funds to any bank account in Australia (using the pay anyone function), so there's no restraint of a linked account that is the standard feature in other accounts.UBank will cap deposits at $1 million per customer.Gerd Schenkel, General Manager UBank, says the project to build the online bank on NAB's next-generation internet banking platform took 12 months end-to-end."We have a core team that covers all the key function managers including call centre, risk management and so forth. That team is also tasked with the development, research and design of new offerings."They are also tasked with the building and project management of those offerings and finally they are tasked also with the running of the existing business."We wanted to ensure there is very strong continuity from customer research all the way to the release of the offering and to the management of the offering."In more siloed approaches, when there is a handover from the development team to the project team and then finally to the BAU [business as usual] team, when you do hand over you may lose some of the original intent."Schenkel says that the people who meet on one day to discuss the management of the existing business are the same people who meet the next day to discuss the development of new products. The UBank internet banking interface is described by Schenkel as "content rich" and features a visual calculator that plots and projects the customer's progress towards their savings goal.Despite making the point that "we use Twitter" and using the phrase "leveraging social media" more than once while speaking to The Sheet yesterday, Schenkel says the typical customer comes to UBank by word of mouth from family and friends.As for the USaver account's 5.11 per cent rate, Schenkel says it is a variable rate that may be adjusted in the future.