BEHIND THE NUMBERS: Platforms are delivering

Banking is changing so rapidly, it takes forethought, insight and conviction to build things now to enable us to provide the services and experiences our customers will expect down the track.

"The amount of payments being directed through all of our platforms has grown, with digital payments volumes more than doubling since 2020.”

ANZ has been operating for almost 200 years and in that time, we’ve had to constantly adapt the way we do business. This includes building new systems for how we serve and delight our customers as their needs and preferences evolve.

The way technology, regulation and innovation are changing banking means we need to continuously be investing so we can meet and exceed our customers’ expectations in the future.

We have been simplifying our business for most of the last decade – selling more than 30 businesses and refocusing where we can make a real difference to our customers.

Proceeds from those asset sales – as well as productivity improvements we’ve made in recent years – have allowed us to invest in two key initiatives which are making a huge difference to our customers.

We’ve built new technology platforms to radically improve the way we operate and overhaul the way we interact with customers. These platforms are the tools our customers use to manage money, giving them control, security and insights – whether they are big or small, simple or complex.

Transactive Global is our payments and cash management system for mid-sized, large and multinational customers and ANZ Plus is our digital first, human-supported retail banking platform. It will soon become home to some small business customers too.

New propositions

These resilient, scalable, low cost and agile platforms provide the underlying technology to drive our business, allowing us to deliver propositions quickly for our customers and to innovate at pace attracting more customers, engaging them and ultimately driving higher customer lifetime value.

Their development was possible due to the investment of about $2.5 billion over the past five years to improve our technical capabilities, create new propositions and provide more seamless, compelling and secure banking experiences. The return on that investment is already being realised in our results.

As we announce results for the 2024 financial year today, the Institutional division – which is home to the payments and cash management business – achieved its highest ever revenue. It contributed more than a third of the group’s revenue and also had a record return on equity.

And the amount of payments being directed through our Institutional platforms has grown, with digital payments volumes more than doubling since 2020.

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The investment in Transactive Global began several years ago. We set out to build a digital banking platform to give corporate customers – mid-sized, large and global – access to cash management, trade finance, loans, commercial cards, markets and data insights in one place.

Previously those customers faced a more disjointed digital experience – almost like they were dealing with different banks for different ANZ products. This is because we used multiple digital channels aligned to the products, rather than aligning to the customers who used them.

Since then, we have migrated about 65,000 customers from the old vendor platform, which was slow to change and costly to maintain, to Transactive Global. We are now extending it across the rest of our regional footprint.

A mobile future

Many of the same principles have underpinned the development of ANZ Plus, one of Australia’s fastest growing new digital banking platforms.  

Back when we began the ANZ Plus journey, we established a team to build an Australian-first, new retail bank designed to meet customers where they increasingly are – seeking digital services on mobile devices.

Instead of being tied to legacy banking systems, we built entirely new systems, processes and products, all underpinned by modern data and technology capabilities. And all of it designed to help to improve the financial wellbeing of our customers.

The new technology stack behind ANZ Plus is resilient and agile and can process changes and updates far more regularly and quickly than was previously possible.

Just a little over two years in market, it has already attracted more than 850,000 customers – about 48 per cent of which were new to ANZ in the financial year. Crucially, deposits increased 70 per cent to about $16 billion and almost half of Plus customers are using one of our financial wellbeing features, like round-ups, card controls or setting a savings goal.

ANZ Plus has released a raft of cyber safe features to help protect our customers from scams and fraud, and more new security-led services are coming.

These measures called `Scam Safe’ were introduced almost six months ago and include Screen Share Protect, which helps protect customers from remote access scams, and Geo-Location which helps us spot unusual banking activity from unexpected places.

Other features include Risky App Detection to help identify installed apps that may compromise a customer’s accounts and active call status which helps detect unusual behaviour from a customer while on a phone call.

Finally, the Crypto Protect feature has helped prevent customers from online investment scams by blocking payments to crypto exchanges. Since it was introduced, we have seen a 140 per cent decrease in customer losses to crypto currency.  

Bringing benefits

Finally, the agility of the ANZ Plus platform will become crucial as we push towards another key strategic milestone – upgrading all our existing customers to ANZ Plus, starting from next year.

ANZ customers are already seeing the benefits of the technology and systems of ANZ Plus. In coming years so too will about 1.2 million Suncorp Bank customers, following our successful acquisition of the Queensland-based lender earlier this year.

Benefits such as the ones experienced by customers using Transactive Global and ANZ Plus are the reason we make these bold strategic decisions.

The lead times on these investments can be long and it’s not always easy when the financial and operational benefits are yet to be realised.

But we must stay the course, if we are to deliver the services customers want and deserve, – and to lay the foundations for ANZ to prosper long beyond our 200^th year in 2028.

Shayne Elliott is CEO of ANZ.