Westpac invests $800m in digital revamp
Out of a total investment spend of $1.4 billion, Westpac has revealed it invested more than $800 million in system upgrades and its digital transformation plan.
In its latest full year financial results, the Australian bank says it has migrated 100 applications onto its cloud infrastructure platforms “which are now largely complete”. Additionally, it has over 120 APIs in production and another 180 in development.
Westpac CEO Brian Hartzer adds: “These capabilities support our customer service hub which is progressing to schedule.”
As reported last year, Westpac embarked on a major project to roll out a new data integration solution – Oracle Customer Hub – bank-wide. The project will take three years in total, it is understood, starting with the bank’s consumer mortgage business line.
“In a difficult year, Westpac delivered a flat financial result”
The news follows on from June when it made the jump and moved all its core banking applications into its brand new private cloud environment. That move was in preparation for open banking, with mainly regulatory apps having been moved, as well as a giant customer service hub.
Elsewhere in the results, its statutory net profit was AU$8.09 billion ($5.8 billion), up 1%. Hartzer says: “In a difficult year, Westpac delivered a flat financial result.”
The bank is a long-standing user of the Hogan core banking system from US-based CSC. In 2010, the bank embarked on a lengthy upgrade of the legacy core to the newer offering from CSC, Celeriti.
Last week, rival National Australia Bank (NAB) said it was aiming to migrate 35% of its IT application portfolio to the cloud within the next three to five years, according to the bank’s latest full year results.
