Westpac Banking Corporation - Digital Transformation Strategies

Westpac Banking Corporation - Digital Transformation Strategies

Summary

This report provides insight into Westpac's fintech activities, including its digital transformation strategies, its innovation programs, its technology initiatives, its estimated ICT budget, and its major ICT contracts.

Westpac Banking (Westpac) is a provider of personal, private, business, and corporate banking solutions. Its portfolio of products consists of accounts, cards, life and non-life insurance, personal and business loans, mortgages, overdraft facilities, banking supportive solutions, and financing and leasing. Westpac provides retirement planning, advisory, merchant solutions, foreign exchange, industry-specific banking, capital advisory, transaction banking, and financial market solutions. It operates through a network of branch offices, ATMs, representative offices, and online portals and serves retail, commercial, government and institutions, and SME clients.

In November 2022, Westpac joined as one of the six founding members to form a consortium of businesses promoting the adoption of AI within financial services. The UNSW AI fintech hub will bring together industry-leading researchers and businesses, including AWS and Databricks, to tackle emerging challenges associated with AI.

In November 2022, Westpac’s TechX event entered seventh year of its commencement, which forms a part of the bank’s efforts to keep employees engaged about emerging technologies. TechX brings together everyone in the tech community and provides them with an idea about what they are doing in the bank and an external perspective to know the demand for future tech skills and requirements.

Scope

• Westpac has been leveraging emerging technologies including AI, big data, cloud computing, and automation to minimize its operational costs, simplify processes, consolidate systems, and transform customer experience. At the end of fiscal year (FY) 2022, the bank had 5.5 million digitally active customers, and over 90% of all transactions were made digitally during the year.
• Westpac has been investing in its system upgrades and digital innovations to improve operational efficiencies. The company has migrated various applications from physical servers to a centralized cloud infrastructure platform to simplify and streamline its processes. The company is leveraging IBM and Microsoft cloud platforms to shift its computing workload to a private cloud environment; Adobe’s marketing cloud solution to optimize and streamline its marketing operations; and Coupa’s cloud-based procurement platform to improve its internal operations and help clients managing business spending and make payments to suppliers.
• Westpac is focused on using digital to make banking simpler and more intuitive for customers, while it has been using technologies such as AI, data analytics and cloud to transform its business model and meet customers’ digital expectations. The bank has launched several digital solutions in recent years by introducing Westpac Verify to protect customers from potential scams; EFTPOS Air to enable small businesses to accept mobile payments; Presto, a cloud-based merchant terminal app, for businesses.

Reasons to Buy

• Gain insights into Westpac's tech operations.
• Gain insights into its tech strategies and innovation initiatives.
• Gain insights into its technology themes under focus.
• Gain insights into various product launches, partnerships, investments, and acquisition strategies.