Multinational financial services company Westpac revealed its massive timetable for its IT services revamp. Bob McKinnon, the company's group executive for technology, detailed the three-year project that will increase the bank's productivity, improve its system's reliability, and enhance the customer experience.

Online banking

By 2012, Westpac aims to provide a new online banking platform for its retail, business, and corporate customers. This new platform is expected to be faster, more secure, and accessible to mobile users. "The platform will support our 2 million-plus active online customers in Westpac ... and will put the customer in control. It will allow them to do their banking, how and when they want, be it on a PC, mobile phone or other mobile device like an iPad, or for that matter, any other mobile technology that emerges in the future," McKinnon said.

Customer service

A new customer service platform will accompany the online improvements, which will be designed for Westpac's front- and back-of-house staff.

The strategy prioritizes an increased sharing of IT infrastructure between Westpac and its recently acquired subsidiary, St. George. Also, the St. George call centre will be upgraded from the Unity system, and Westpac's own teller system will shift to St. George's Spider platform. Before the end of the financial year, the bank intends to host St. George card services, a high-value payment hub and a new online trade finance facility on Westpac infrastructure.

Short-term revamps

The more immediate changes will take place within the next six months, during which the bank will implement a new telephony system for all its branches; upgrade two of its data centres while decommissioning another; shift from a paper signature system (with around 5 million signatures) to a new and faster digital system; and install a new collections case-handling system for retail and business customers.

Delayed migration

According to McKinnon, Westpac has delayed migrating to the Hogan core banking system, choosing instead to focus on customer-centric systems. The migration itself won't begin until 2014.

"We had originally intended to commence the migration earlier; however, in the interest of delivering better customer services, we see greater value in integrating our customer information management systems, and this has been moved up in our priorities," said McKinnon.

The bank wants a quicker time-to-market through Six Sigma and Lean methodologies, and will retrain its staff to focus on cutting unnecessary processes and wastage out of project development.

So far, Westpac has identified 250 project re-engineering opportunities to cut from its day-to-day business and expects the completion of 20 projects by the end of the financial year.

"In summary, we've come a long way in our technology journey over the last two years, we've strengthened the team, significantly improved the reliability of our systems, strengthened governance, enhanced relationships with our suppliers, completed our initial merger-related work and are now well on the way to delivery of the [strategic investment projects]. We have much to be proud of, albeit plenty more to do," McKinnon concluded.