The Bank We’re Building: Maile Carnegie

The world in which we are operating, the world in which our customers are living and the world in which our staff are working, is constantly evolving. In that sense, we will always be building our bank.

I think about The Bank We’re Building in quite a literal way. How each division, each team - how Australia Retail - will deliver the important program of work required to achieve our Purpose.

In Australia Retail, our program of work is anchored in what we believe will have the biggest impact and that is helping to improve the financial wellbeing of our customers.

We need to offer tools, insights, support and exceptional services to help Australians who are homeowners or who are serious about one day owning a home. We need to make sure they are financially more informed and more resilient. We need to make sure, when they are looking to get that mortgage, the home they choose is within their means. That it won’t stretch them too far, that they will be able to sustainably support and happily live in that home.

Financial wellbeing is at the heart of what we're trying to deliver.

Culture

Underpinning this program is our culture and our behaviours. One really important role a healthy culture plays is driving engagement and excitement for people to be their best selves, professionally and personally, at work.

But culture plays another critical role and that is making sure the thousands of decisions we make every day are made in a way that helps us take a step towards our goals. It is easy to forget just how many people we have working in Australian Retail and how many decisions, some big, some smaller, are being made by 12,000 people across an average eight-hour day.

It is our culture that will determine whether those decisions are helping us pull forward and deliver or not. When a banker in one of our branches sees a customer waiting in line to talk to a teller when what they want to do could be done quicker and easier via self-service or an ATM, what does our banker do? Do they go the extra step and walk the customer over and show them how to self-serve?

Culture will also determine whether we speak up if someone is not being treated with respect or alert a manager if we see a risk. Culture underpins everything we do.

Working as a team

We are literally building a new retail bank in Australia. And it is critical to understand everyone in the division already has a role or will have a role in the near future to help deliver this.  We are now at the phase of the build where we don’t have two separate teams.

Increasingly, the stitching together of work across the ANZx and current banking teams is creating shared goals and a shared strategy.  A joined-up roadmap is already well advanced in distribution and servicing and will emerge across the balance of the division during the next six months or so. 

For example, if we consider our ambition to win in home loans, that is an area where a huge number of people across the division have an important role to play.

Our existing home loan team is looking at how we automate the servicing of home loans – and this involves close collaboration with the ANZx Buy and Own a Home team as well as technology and the customer service team. The automation we’re putting in place will improve function across both our existing business and ANZ Plus too.

This kind of collaboration is happening elsewhere too – we are having very active conversations about coordinated roadmaps right across the division.

Milestones

We are making great progress. Notably, we have returned to a position where we can efficiently service and support those who apply for a home loan with us. Improving our capacity to process loans was a huge milestone. Now we are looking at our existing ANZ home loan business and how it can meet the inherent demand we have to grow. We need to hold or grow market share. We are on the cusp of that.

Launching the first customer proposition we have built on the ANZ Plus platform, a new savings and transaction product with financial wellbeing at its core, was another huge milestone. We’re continually upgrading and improving the experience for our ANZ Plus customers with our most requested features from early adopters now delivered and with much more to come. And we’ve just gone above the line with advertising.

A huge milestone ahead of us is getting the ANZ Plus home loan into beta testing by the end of this calendar year and then launching it to real customers in FY23.

Meanwhile we have milestones around being safe and well managed, notably the commitment we've made to our customers and to some of our key partners around correcting mistakes we've made in the past.

The financial wellbeing cornerstone

Increasingly it doesn't matter what part of the division you look at, financial wellbeing has been baked into the focus and the specific work being done. Every single team mission is anchored in financial wellbeing.

You can see it in the new financial wellbeing features we’re adding to our ANZ Plus savings and transaction accounts, including the ease with which our customers can set savings goals. You can see it on our frontline where we’ve boosted training and materials so we can help customers self-serve – which means making their banking easier and more understandable for them.

You see it in our marketing department and the wonderful advertising we're putting out which is very much focused on people who identify with a financial wellbeing message or want to improve their financial wellbeing.

From my perspective, pretty much everyone in our business is contributing in some way to building a better bank that will support our strategy of helping our customers to improve their financial wellbeing.

Maile Carnegie is Group Executive Australia Retail at ANZ