Macquarie's banking division closes in on its public cloud target

Macquarie’s banking division has clicked over the 96 percent mark for workloads running in public cloud, closing in on its 100 percent migration goal.

Banking and financial services (BFS) division CIO Richard Heeley told the Google Cloud Next 24 summit in Las Vegas earlier this month that it had hit “96.4 percent” on the morning he presented - April 11.

Heeley said that the goal to “be 100 percent [in] public cloud” was set as far back as 2016-17, although it really only was made public in early 2020, when half of “IT infrastructure” was said to be public cloud hosted.

The aim at that point had been to get to 100 percent in FY22, although this month’s update appears to show that, as with many all-in cloud projects, a small percentage of workloads can be challenging to migrate.

Heeley used his appearance at the summit to mostly talk up what BFS calls its ‘Customer Intelligence Engine’, a repository of customer and transactional data used for personalisation and as the foundation to build new customer-facing digital services.

Macquarie’s ambition for customer data analytics has been out in the open for several years, although this appears to be the first time the bank has specifically discussed its efforts around the ‘Customer Intelligence Engine’ publicly.

“We spent a great deal of time putting all of our data onto Google [Cloud, so] all of our customer data sits in something we call ‘Customer Intelligence Engine’. That asset then allows us to build on that for customers,” Heeley said.

“We’ve done a couple of things recently [around] cashflow prediction, so clearly if a customer’s got sufficient transactional volume with us, we can quite clearly give them a cashflow prediction using AI. 

“The second thing that we’ve launched quite recently is variable rate review, so any mortgage customer in Australia who’s a customer of Macquarie can ask using the mobile app for a rate review on their mortgage to see if their recent transactional history has therefore improved their overall rating and they can get a different rating on their mortgage. 

“So those things we’re beginning to build, and by putting all of our data in the ‘Customer Intelligence Engine’ it allows us to move quite quickly on that.”