ANZ chief Nuno Matos has thrown his support behind the “technology, architecture and platforms” of digital offering ANZ Plus, but has made changes to the delivery model and pace of the program.
ANZ Plus, which went live in 2022, is a new banking platform that ANZ started building back in 2019.
At a strategy update, Matos sought to remind analysts of why the bank decided to pursue ANZ Plus in the first place.
“Let me remind you what ANZ Plus was designed to do: it was a full replatforming of our retail and SME business, including the frontend, channels, products and all platforms other than the core banking platform,” Matos said.
Matos said a “comprehensive review” of ANZ Plus had identified issues with the delivery model and cadence of change.
“I am confident that our ANZ Plus technology, architecture and platforms provide the right foundation to deliver a market-leading customer experience,” he said.
“However … two things were not right and made it too slow and too expensive.
“The pace of the rollout of ANZ Plus has been too slow. The sequence of development was predominantly vertical, product by product, which put the customer at the end of the journey, meaning we would only have a viable end-to-end proposition when all products were built in our middleware and subsequently reflected in our frontend.
“Second, our delivery model was inefficient. It was expensive, with complex processes, lack of prioritisation and capability gaps”.
Matos said the bank had experienced “structural and system duplication, brand and channel ambiguity” and, as a result, a financial burden.
In simple terms, today the bank has three digital frontends, three middleware platforms and two core banking systems. In the case of the latter, one serves its ANZ Classic and ANZ Plus offerings, and the other its Suncorp Bank brand which it acquired mid-2024.
The bank today set a goal to have one digital frontend – ANZ Plus – and one core banking system in place by September 2027. All eight million of its retail customers were expected to be using the Plus frontend.
“Customers see a frontend from us – they see our channels, they see the mobile, the internet, they deal with our branches and call centres. They don’t see the rest.
“So the first thing you have to do is deliver them a best-in-class frontend, with one brand – don’t confuse them,” Matos said.
“There will be one team, with one brand, one single customer frontend, one system stack instead of almost three of everything and much sooner than previously planned.
“The experience for ANZ customers will be significantly modernised and improved, while also providing better security and features”.
In the three years post-September 2027, the bank will methodically rework the middleware layer, “eliminating” legacy middleware and consolidating on a single platform.
“You digest the rest of the middleware at the pace that your ambition, financials, [and] your sustainable investment levels allow,” Matos said.
“Customers will not feel it because they have the best frontend.
“That’s what we should be doing – and that’s what banks do globally: they deliver transformations horizontally.”
In addition to bringing forward the benefits promised by ANZ Plus, and creating a customer-first proposition – something that is central to the bank’s new 2030 strategy – Matos said that the program would also “need less money” owing to delivery model and pacing efficiencies.
