Carnegie: an exciting time for Australia Retail banking

Speaking with bluenotes on video, Carnegie says when the decision was made three years ago to separate the businesses, the question was not whether they would come back together again but when it would be appropriate.

"The engine we are building in ANZx means you’re going to see a lot of functionality continue to drop to get it from minimum-viable to best in class.” – Maile Carnegie

“[We] were more focused on the milestones or the conditions we felt had to be met in order to have confidence that when we did bring it back together again it was going to be successful,” she explains.

“Firstly, getting the remediation and the regulatory agenda to a point where it was still really important, still something we needed to keep our eye on, but it can be treated more as ‘business as usual’. [And] having confidence the transformation team… was going to be able to deliver the quality of work but also the roadmap and delivery of work sufficient for us to have confidence it was going to genuinely transform the underpinning of the bank.”

Carnegie says the team has done an extraordinary amount of work to meet these two conditions which represent the work of a huge number of people across the bank.

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Click here for a transcript of this interview

Future focus

On her immediate priorities, Carnegie said she intends to spend a lot of time listening to her team to understand what their focuses are. However, she says she does intend to split her attention between business priorities and organisational priorities.

“The business priorities… are going to be very consistent with the priorities the team already have,” she explains. “To increase our competitiveness in home loans and get our revenue momentum going, to get the first ANZ Plus proposition out - and making sure that it’s not just landing well but we can see that it’s improving the financial wellbeing of our customers - to accelerate the ANZ Plus home loan position and to make sure our resources are properly allocated across the teams.”

Carnegie says she wants to spend more time on the organisational priorities such as ensuring the team remains high performing through the transition.

“When bringing the teams together, how can we make sure things like our decision making is sped up? That we’ve got really great communication and relationships across the newly formed team… that [the transition] brings more energy and even more motivation into the teams themselves.”

She also points to increasing the focus on customers as a key challenge for the team, as well as balancing resourcing between short- and long-term goals. 

The Plus side

On the formal launch of the first customer proposition being built by the ANZx team – a savings and transaction account under the ANZ Plus banner – Carnegie says the team has built a product that will help to improve the financial wellbeing of customers and has a focus on continuous improvement through ongoing functionality updates.

“The engine we are building means you’re going to see a lot of functionality continue to drop to get it from minimum-viable to hopefully best in class,” she says. “For example, across March and April we’ve got about 40 functionality [updates] we’re going to be releasing just for these two products.”

Carnegie says the next big focus for the ANZx team is launching a new home loans proposition – something the team are well advanced in the design and delivery of.

“There’s a lot to go but it’s never going to end,” she says. “Our customers continue to increase their expectations and we’ve got to keep pace with them.”

You can listen to the whole conversation in the video above.

Andrew Cornell is Managing Editor of bluenotes