ANZ signs fresh four-year IBM agreement

ANZ Banking Group has signed a four-year technology agreement with IBM to support its digital transformation and core system modernisation.

The agreement gives ANZ access to "the majority of IBM's software product catalogue", enabling it to utilise newer tools in transformation of its enterprise IT, branch and secure online banking services.

The new agreement is said to also boost API and DevOps capabilities of ANZ’ core banking systems running on IBM’s z16, “with an integrated on-chip AI accelerator, delivering latency-optimised inferencing, and also provides innovations such as compute as cloud, which allows the bank to run workloads and applications in a cloud consumption model.”

It extends a relationship with IBM that has been in place for the past four decades.

ANZ’s group general manager for cloud, data and infrastructure services Terry Powell said the bank “will also have access to the IBM Innovation Academy, to promote innovation investment within the bank.”

“The role of technology is more vital than ever and the link between banks and technology companies is becoming more important," Powell said.

“We look forward to working with IBM to deliver excellent services to our customers faster."

ANZ is expected to gain access to specialist engineering skills, enablement, and technology such as quantum computing.

ANZ and IBM have worked together under pervious projects including partnering in the development of the IT approach and technology for the mainframe at the bank.

One project saw the bank work with IBM in 2020 to implement IBM z16 to improve the ANZ mainframe environment's processing capacity flexibility and improve system resiliency.

ANZ has also worked together with IBM as part of a consortium experimenting with the Lygon blockchain platform.