Westpac: Empowering Customers Through Digital Transformation

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At Westpac we’ve set a goal of becoming one of the world’s great service companies, recognising that our customers compare us not just with the experience offered by local banks but by the global web-based businesses they conduct and experience every day.

Customers of businesses across industries around the planet are empowered with greater knowledge, and banking is no different. And like digitally savvy clients around the planet expect more – more personalized attention, increased choice and unlimited service, instantly.

That’s why two years ago we embarked on a complete digital transformation that we began by asking how we could enable our customers to conduct all of their banking online and on any device – creating an easier, faster way to bank everywhere, all the time. In other words, we wanted to disrupt not the technology, but the customer experience.

Mobile is King and IBM Cloud the Enabler

Mobile is now the channel of choice for customers, so the notion that comprehensive online banking is done on the desktop and then ‘dumbed down’ for tablet and smartphone is really outdated. That was one of the legacy assumptions we challenged early on in our journey to become a true digital bank.

Next we created four ‘pillars’ that support our new digital strategy and which led to the creation of a single, responsive, device-agnostic banking platform called Westpac One which went live in early 2015.

The first pillar was to create a digital environment that allowed customers to apply for all the services they can do today in a branch online. To date, around 90% of the bank’s products can be activated online.

Second, we wanted to make it faster and easier for customers to do their banking through the device of their choice. This includes providing a deeper understanding of the individual spending and saving patterns of our customers.

Next, we wanted to recognise customers as individuals, each with his or her distinct needs, and meet those in more personalised ways. Thanks to a programme that we refer to internally as Symphony (a dynamic communications framework which extends our use of big data and analytics) we are having targeted conversations with customers about products and services they need as their circumstances change. We have doubled the number of customers we talk to and our contacts per customer have gone from around four per year to more than 10 and are much more meaningful.

Finally, we set out to ask for and receive feedback quickly and easily, so that we could act on it – a critical pillar in our strategy. So critical that during development we had 50,000 customers using Westpac One in beta and providing feedback. As part of this effort, we also engaged in crowd-sourcing ideas which led to some valuable new services, like the ability to immediately temporarily block and unblock credit cards if they have been lost or stolen. We also now take advantage of unstructured data to understand customer sentiment and trends in real-time and respond quickly if needed.

Since the launch of Westpac One, we have seen dramatic customer behavior shifts – we’ve seen a 30% increase in online usage – all driven out of mobile devices. More than 65% of our online customers are now using mobile devices to bank. The services available on mobile devices are also seeing significant shifts in applications for products. For example, they’re excited about the speed of many of our services, like the ability to approve online loan applications for existing customers in less than 60 seconds.

Where 18 months ago less than 10% of lending applications were made online, today that figure is 40% – and I expect it to soon climb to over 50% by the end of the financial year. Online is now driving about 15% of total applications we get for home lending, and 40% of those are from people who aren’t currently Westpac customers.

IBM’s responsive, data rich platform, based on Watson and MobileFirst, makes Westpac One possible. The single platform means we are not developing three or four times to cater for online, mobile and tablet. Now we have one team working on one platform that powers all devices, a much more straight forward approach which means we now develop new features five times faster and five times cheaper than two years ago.

By staying focussed on the customer experience we are not trying to ‘pick winners’ from new technologies. Instead Westpac One provides a consistent experience on any device, from mobiles and desktops to smartwatches, giving customers the sense of empowerment and control of their banking.