How Westpac’s largest transformation project came together

Westpac’s internal technology shop has always been in it for the long haul.

Come the rain, shine and the occasional hail of management changes, Australia’s oldest bank has not wavered from materially improving customer service.

Not just online and in branches but for the technology its staff use day to day  to make things happen.

The project is a finalist in the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2020. 

As a multi-brand bank, a core challenge of Westpac has been standardising and unifying systems that have served their time well, but need to move with the times.

It’s no small challenge, yet Westpac has stayed the course of its core mission through the building of a unified Customer Service Hub spanning across not only its core umbrella brand but equally St. George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA.

Starting with secured lending – mortgages – the most complex area of the multi-brand business the consolidation and uplift commenced wit rationalising more than 23 systems.

The call to start with secured lending systems was a sound one, both at a customer satisfaction and commercial level.

It’s where where Westpac’s core customers, established and new – or front book and back book – feel the greatest uplift across all its brands.

The delivery point of the Customer Service Hub has been a smooth, , faster home loan experience for Westpac bankers and customers, by guiding and supporting the customer through the key elements of getting into the property market, agnostic of what channel they choose.

In public sector parlance, it’s an inclusive ‘no wrong door’ strategy.

Rather than sitting as a silo, CSH has been integrated into Westpac Group’s technology ecosystem, as the first step to standardise the back-end systems to give bankers a modern origination platform with a single view of customers across brands, reduce the number of systems used and enable continuous conversations regardless of whether in a branch or online.

Westpac also cites the project as having delivered single view of customer information and loan application status for staff as well as a simplified and digitised application assessment and approval for customers and bankers that deletes cumbersome manual processes.

Deliberately set out in Plain English terms when an offer and acceptance are made – the basics of a contract – Westpac customers can also view their loan application progress at any time. To help make that happen applicants can digitally upload necessary documents from home at any time.

Which beats sitting in a branch.

Westpac says the core solution utilised Oracle Banking Platform with development “primarily focused on integration of the platform into the existing Westpac/St.George eco-system.”

The end result is a radical simplification and standardisation of processes across Westpac brands using an “out of the box” strategy with “limited customisation or extensions” principles applied to a core Oracle Banking Platform.

This project is a finalist in the Finance category of the iTnews Benchmark Awards 2020.