Dalton: digital first a plus for financial wellbeing

Speaking with bluenotes on video ahead of the launch, Dalton said a lot of banking products and services were originally designed for a “world with paper” but that ANZ Plus harnesses the power of the phone in your pocket.

"Then there are platforms or systems [that have] digital features that are going to differentiate us in the future. So those ones we deliberately chose to invest in and build ourselves.” – Peter Dalton

“With new technology and new processes, we can allow someone to join the bank in... minutes from the comfort of their couch,” he explains.

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Click here for a transcript of this video

Dalton says there has been an enormous amount of work completed over the past few years – mostly unseen – upgrading the bank’s “tech stack” to enable a modern, digital first experience.

“(ANZ has) about 300 systems that people use every day like internet banking, mobile apps, lending systems and branch systems. Some of them were put in place five, 10, 15, even 25 years ago,” he explains. “We had to look at some of them and go, ‘can this do that for us?’ And some of them couldn't.”

Dalton says ultimately the ANZx team who designed the ANZ Plus proposition decided to invest in uplifting “about half” of the existing retail banking technology systems and the other half have been replaced with digital platforms.

Future thinking

Another feature of the ANZ Plus app which will help differentiate the bank from its competitors is the ability to look forward at what might be future expected transactions – something that has a direct link to helping improve financial wellbeing.

“All bank accounts look backwards and say ‘here's what you spent in the last 30, 60, 90 days’,” says Dalton, but the new proposition will use data to help predict what a customer might spend tomorrow or next week or further into the future.

Using machine learning, the ANZ Plus app will analyse spending data and learn to predict regular payments such as those for rent or streaming service subscriptions.

“It sounds a bit scary… [but when] people see it, it's like ‘oh wow, I didn't realise I had signed up for that many regular payments’.”

Partnering for better CX

On the decision to work with companies like Salesforce and Atlassian, Dalton says the decision on what to keep in-house and what to work on with others was relatively simple.

“When it came to wanting a modern customer relationship management system, we said ‘actually, we're not in the business of building them’. Salesforce is and they're one of the best in the world, lots of companies use them so we'll just leverage them,” he says.

“Then there are platforms or systems [that have] digital features that are going to differentiate us in the future. So those ones we deliberately chose to invest in and build ourselves.

“So we've got a combination. We've got… things we do ourselves where we really want to differentiate and want to own because this experience is going to be critical to us [and] different compared to some of our competitors.”

Investing in financial wellbeing

Dalton says financial wellbeing has been at the centre of decisions made by the ANZx team, using a set of financial wellbeing principles which will be built in to future propositions. Although business propositions have not yet launched, he adds the philosophy of financial wellbeing carries over more broadly for ANZ.

 “If [a business customer] is doing better, it's getting ahead, it's got finances under control and it's growing, that's actually good for the business, it's good for employment, it's good for the economy.”

Dalton says the team has plans to grow the offerings to include home lending, credit cards, term deposits and more over time.

“If the propositions are really good… our customers …  will move across to [ANZ Plus] and it will become the… modern, new, super competitive ANZ.”

You can listen to the full conversation by watching the video above.

Andrew Cornell is Managing Editor of bluenotes