ANZ maps IT out to 2017

Beverley Head
Monday, 18 July 2011 12:08

Business IT - Technology

After 18 months bunkered down reviewing the IT systems at the ANZ and their alignment with the bank's ambitions to be a super-regional financial giant, chief information officer Anne Weatherston has provided the market with an outline of the bank's technology roadmap to 2017.

ANZ CEO Mike Smith announced that the blueprint had been developed at the bank's half year results in May, but it wasn't until Friday last week that much detail emerged. At a briefing in Sydney Ms Weatherston and Graham Hodges, the bank's deputy CEO, explained that instead of streamlining the bank's multiple core banking platforms, it would continue to operate three separate core systems - one in Australia, one in New Zealand and one to support its operations in Asia.

Despite maintaining these silos the bank has developed an architecture which will allow it to take information from each of these systems to provide it with a consolidated customer view and accurate snapshot of its financial position which is required under the Basel international banking agreements.

In May Mr Smith said that the bank's total IT spend was around $1.7 billion - but on Friday ANZ revised that down to $1.5 billion.

Certain milestones for that investment have already been reached. For example in the institutional bank ANZ has designed a cross regional cash management system called Transactive, which is now available in Australia and New Zealand and which will be progressively rolled out in Asia.

Ms Weatherston said that the bank's online platform had been refreshed and that it had worked with SingTel to upgrade its communications network across Asia. ANZ has also started to roll out a virtual desktop strategy across the bank to complement what Ms Weatherston described as 'aggressive virtualisation programmes' in the data centres.

While she was cautious in her support for public clouds, Ms Weatherston seems to be preparing the bank for the introduction of internal private clouds, running on the three different core systems already deployed. This would suit the super-regional strategy (using a customer registry able to track and connect customers across the regions and a new online portal now being developed for customer access) while allowing the bank to comply with the information transparency requirements of the looming Basel III agreement.