Building the infrastructure for a super regional bank
Patrick Maes, GM, Technology Global Strategy & Architecture and CTO, talks about ANZ becoming a super regional bank, investing in sharable components, cloud and open interfaces, and technology priorities for next couple of years. March 12, 2014 | Neeti AggarwalANZ bank has an ambition to become a superregional bank and technology infrastructure is a key pillar of the strategy. “Our IT investment is guided by our Technology strategy called ‘Towards 2017’. This strategy was developed and approved by the Board in early 2011, where we identified the fundamental building blocks required to become a super-regional bank”, explained Maes.
To achieve its goal, the bank is planning to be less locally aligned and to focus more on shareable IT components. “This investment in IT has been quite stable in the last 4 to 5 years; however as a result of our work on ‘Towards 2017’ we are now increasingly investing in enterprise building blocks relative to country specific assets. This means we are now investing in more of ‘sharable’ building blocks across individual countries. These include key capabilities such as a single customer view, a single channel customer experience, and a single identification process. We also nominated a global payments capability that enables us to execute payments across multiple currencies and 34 markets,” added Patrick. The bank declared 11% annual growth in profits for 2013. Over $1.3 billion was invested in growth and transformation initiatives across the bank during the year, including the Banking on Australia programme and expansion in Asia. The strong performance of the bank has been the result of a distinctive long-term strategy focused on growth in its domestic franchises and targeted expansion in Asia. ANZ is focusing on security and customer service. “It is an interesting period, when most banks are focused on mobility. We see mobility as important but only one factor. Another important factor is security. It should be adaptive to the conditions but not a burden. It is important to deliver a ‘Serve me’ capability - if I contact my bank, my problem will be resolved at first point of contact and not passed to a lengthy back office process,” explained Maes Transformation however is never easy to bring about. “In a digitised world a key challenge is speed. Our customers’ experience across industries is extremely adaptive, mobile and fast and they expect the same from ANZ. They do often forget that we are much more regulated, with greater security requirements. However, this expectation means that time-to-market is even more important than cost, though of course we would like to get cost down. We believe our operations should facilitate straight through processing where ever possible to assist with this”, he remarked “A second challenge is adopting open system and architecture. We anticipate that the banking experience of tomorrow will consist of supporting life events, where we provide a complete service offering around a certain life event such as buying a house for example, rather than just a mortgage. This approach might mean bundling relevant products with meaningful advice about individual events customers are dealing with and, as a result, make their life easier from a banking perspective - we can already see that happening in the industry - the USAA for example, a bank originally created to serve the military. This bundling capability will become more important. And the only way we can do this is with a relatively open architecture,” he added. The future road map for the transition will be in favour of cloud and open interfaces. “We will move more towards the intelligent adoption of external provisioning and cloud technology where appropriate, and technically more towards open interfaces and software, that will enable us to connect with elements in our broader ecosystem and provide a more holistic offering to our customers”. “The bottom line here is that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate based on bank products and services alone, and so we need to become the intelligent bank. This sort of bank should help you in achieve goals in your life, which is more than just obtaining a financial product. Our challenge is to answer the question - how can we combine our international capabilities with technology and apply this as meaningful services for customers?”This is fundamentally about thinking how we can serve our customers better in a realistic way. This is the philosophy that we have adopted,” explained Maes Towards 2017 is guiding the transformation of its IT systems for the future. Interestingly, while the bank is focusing on various integrations, open architectures and sharable components for its super regional ambition, it still continues to operate on three different core banking systems today for New Zealand, Asia and Pacific markets. Categories: Technology & Operationstechnology, Technology & Operations, Keywords:ANZ Bank, Patrick Maes, Super Regionalization, Technology Transformation ANZ bank, Patrick Maes, super regionalization, technology transformation
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