(27 March 2024 – Australia) Westpac has outlined its ambitious program to reduce complexity and operating costs, streamline operations and establish an upgraded core banking technology platform.
Westpac plans to reduce its costly overlapping technology systems count by more than two-thirds between now and 2028. After more than 16 years, Westpac and its subsidiary St George continue to operate on separate systems. The Australian reports that Westpac has suffered from decades of underspend on technology and a failure to properly integrate St George has left it with multiple tech platforms and this means it has become a perennially high-cost bank.
The bank wide simplification and system deduplication program, labelled ‘Unite’, will result in the bank’s current tech stack of 180 systems slashed within four years to fewer than 60. Westpac will also move to consolidate its three customer master systems used to store critical personal customer data into a “single, common, API-accessible platform”.
“Westpac’s technology isn’t older or less capable than our peers, but simply we have too much of it” Westpac CEO Peter King previously stated.
“The current mix of banker platforms is time-consuming for our people and our customers, making it not only costly to service but also harder to train people across all the systems” said Westpac CIO Scott Collary.