Westpac set to invest billions of dollars to fuel bank-wide tech overhaul
Australian banking heavyweight Westpac has laid out its plans for a major technology overhaul as part of its Project Unite programme.
Westpac will upgrade its tech as part of Project Unite
During its latest technology market update, CEO Peter King described the project as “a business-led, technology-enabled simplification” with progress “already underway”.
The endeavour, which was first outlined in the bank’s full-year results presentation in November, will seek to update and enhance its technology stack, lower its run and change costs, and narrow its cost-to-income ratio, with benefits “delivered progressively out to 2028”.
The bank will invest between AUD 1.8 billion ($1.1 billion) and AUD 2 billion ($1.3 billion) to fuel its tech upgrade initiatives up to 2028.
The reasoning behind the launch of Project Unite, as King’s latest comments indicate, is that although Westpac’s current stack “isn’t older or less capable than peers… we just have too much of it”.
The project’s three core objectives are orientated around delivering “a better customer experience, making systems simpler for our people, and improving shareholder returns”, according to King, with initiatives set to be driven “by the people closest to the customer”, including the bank’s institutional payments and collections teams.
“Unite is about working together across every part of the bank to be simpler, and to deliver results enabled by technology,” King adds, stating that the bank is seeking to become “easier to deal with”.
Measuring the success of the project against tangible equity returns and the growth of its market position, King explains that the first steps of realising its technology update have been actioned through the simplification of its business portfolio and the “good progress” made in transforming its risk management processes.
For the financial year ahead, Unite will now seek to half the number of banker platforms at Westpac to three, while consolidating 11 customer onboarding systems and seven of the bank’s collections systems into two single systems respectively.
The project will build upon the bank’s “upgraded technology foundations”, King explains, which have most recently been bolstered by the integration of its SaferPay product into its banking app this week.
Westpac began to lay the foundations for its tech overhaul with the launch of its enterprise technology roadmap in 2021, which has so far led to its MoneyBrilliant acquisition, its Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) offering built in collaboration with 10x Banking, and its five-year cloud transformation deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS), among other developments.
