From vision to reality

In July this year, I attended an event in Singapore with a group of ANZ’s regional treasury customers

“One of the biggest challenges was deciding on our transformation approach — how would we get there?."

These are people who work for some of the biggest and fastest-growing companies in the region. They work each day to ensure these businesses maintain robust capital levels, proper cashflow and stringent liquidity management.

The occasion was the soft launch of ANZ’s Transactive Global platform into Asia. While we had been communicating to customers for some months the benefits of our modern platform over the 10-year-old system it was replacing, this was their first opportunity to get some hands-on experience.

Transactive Global is our digital banking platform designed for institutional and large corporate customers. It allows them to access services – such as cash management, trade finance, loans, commercial cards, markets and data insights – from one platform.

As our relationship managers guided customers through Transactive Global’s new features, it caused me to reflect on the seven-year journey that got us to this point.

Where we started

The journey started in 2016 with the formation of the Wholesale Digital function within the bank. Before then, customers faced a disjointed digital experience — it was almost like they were dealing with different banks across ANZ’s own product set.

This was due to the use of multiple digital channels across Markets and Transaction Banking – these were aligned to the products, rather than the customers who used them. It was clear change was needed.

ANZ announced a new strategy to build a simpler, better bank. Later that year, the Wholesale Digital function was formed to be the custodian of the Digital Customer Experience for the Institutional division.

We commenced a simplification strategy with the mandate to converge our various channels onto a single omni-channel experience for all Institutional products and services — no small task.

What is omni-channel? It’s a seamless and unified experience for customers across all physical and digital channels. The goal was clear, but we had to navigate our own path to get there.

Home Markets

One of the biggest challenges was deciding on our transformation approach — how would we get there?  A ‘future-ready’ digital business required both operationally efficient processes and data, and an integrated web and mobile experience. Each would be a significant undertaking.

Should we focus on simulating an integrated customer experience first – get all these products into one place for the customer. Then tackle operational complexity after this?

Or would the reverse make more sense? Or should we attempt to do both at once at the risk of losing focus along the way.

We chose the customer experience first — replacing multiple login credentials with single sign-on for an immediate customer improvement. At the same time we built a new in-house web and mobile channel with the capacity required to host all our products and service our regional footprint.

By 2020, we had completed the build of our Omni-Channel (Transactive Global) – converging onto a single channel in our home markets of Australia and New Zealand, decommissioning three customer-facing channels in the process.

We migrated around 65,000 users from a 10-year-old vendor platform that was slow to change and costly to maintain, to a feature-rich, user-friendly platform built and owned by ANZ.

This gave customers a modern interface with configurable workspaces to suit a specific roles and tasks. We also gave customers access to all our products — Payments, Cards, Loans, Deposits, Trade, Foreign Exchange and more. This was supported by growing capabilities in self-service, data insights, and fraud monitoring.

Scaling to Asia

Our ultimate goal was to deliver a modern and consistent customer experience across our regional footprint.  Our current focus is extending Transactive Global to seven countries across our international franchise.

These customers will see a huge improvement on the existing platform, including:

• Mobile access so they can do business on the go, coupled with ANZ Digital Key (a token that replaces physical token approval devices).
• Online help and customer webinars.
• Modern account reporting, real-time alerts and notifications, enhanced statements and scheduling functions.
• Customised and dynamic foreign exchange rates.
• SIgnificant usability enhancements, including access to self-serve capability such as user administration.

Customers in Asia will now receive the same transaction monitoring service we provide to customers in Australia and New Zealand, helping to protect them against cyber fraud.

Additionally, those customers using ANZ Digital Key will benefit from enhanced security in approving sensitive activities such as approving payments. This digital soft token displays the detail of what is being requested for approval instead of just displaying a ‘code’, improving security and helping customers combat scammers and fraud.

Moving to a single channel is great for ANZ too, allowing us to transition from two separate transaction and reporting channels to one covering our entire geographic footprint.

This provides ANZ with richer customer data, simplifies the number of vendors we deal with and lowers the costs of operating two separate channels. Finally, it improves our risk profile by replacing an old platform with a modern one.

The Future

We now need to focus on the experiences adjacent to our omni-channel, many of which have remained consistent for many years.

While our channel is product-agnostic, processes such as onboarding and servicing remain largely product-aligned, creating onerous steps for the customers to traverse.

Complex forms, duplicated data requests and manual checks all add to the time taken to onboard customers. While these can be lessened by the hard work of our bankers there are proven ways we can use technology to our advantage.

We want to be the easiest bank to do business with in the region, where online and mobile interactions are prioritised and assisted and manual processing are minimised. It will be difficult.

Like Weill & Woerner write, we’ll need to perform organisational surgery to cut out the complexity standing in the way of a modern, digital experience. Having undergone one transformation, I’m confident that together we can do it again.

Leigh Mahoney is Head of Wholesale Digital with ANZ Institutional