Westpac picks Oracle and Accenture to build new enterprise-wide customer data hub
Westpac to restructure and centralise customer data bank-wide with Oracle Customer Hub
Westpac has embarked on a major project to roll out a new data integration solution – Oracle Customer Hub – bank-wide.
It is understood that SAP was Oracle’s main contender for the deal.
Accenture was selected as the system integrator.
Westpac is already a user of Oracle tech for its customer master database. The project was carried out under the leadership of Bob McKinnon, Westpac’s CIO from 2008 to 2011.
Plans to introduce a centralised customer service hub that would sit in the middle of the banking group’s IT infrastructure were first voiced in 2014 by Dave Curran, Westpac’s new CIO.
Oracle Customer Hub will bring together all the business logic and data that currently sit in separate systems at Westpac, to provide the banks staff with a holistic view of the customer.
In an interview with iTnews, Curran said: “It’s got three big advantages: it puts the customer at the centre of what you’re doing in an application sense; it isolates the other systems so I can choose strategically when to address them; and third, the data is all kept around the customer, not around the product.”
So everything the bank knows about a customer is linked to that customer rather than to any products or channels, he explained.
There will be a standard set of APIs to enable the interaction between the hub and other systems at Westpac. The bank is a long-standing user of Fiserv’s software for online banking and CSC’s Hogan core banking system for back office processing.
The project will take three years in total, it is understood, starting with the bank’s consumer mortgage business line.
It will also encompass Westpac’s subsidiary, St George Bank. St George is actually a pilot site for the Oracle Customer Hub, Curran told iTnews. The work started six months ago and the new hub has already been interfaced to St George’s core banking system, Celeriti (a newer version of Hogan) – in Curran’s words, “to prove we can do it”.
Celeriti has recently gone live at St George (this project has been underway since 2010). Eventually, it will be implemented at Westpac too, Banking Technology understands.
