The tech-tonic plates are shifting for banking and finance
Blown-out and failed major tech projects in the finance sector have a history of shareholder value destruction, dating back decades. Now a new wave has started — including at ANZ, Westpac and the ASX.
ANZ’s retail boss Maile Carnegie and head of the ANZ Plus project Peter Dalton ran a media briefing yesterday on the latest product to be added to the Plus platform — an entirely new banking platform that will ultimately become the retail bank for all of ANZ.
But we get ahead of ourselves. As Carnegie said yesterday, “another really big milestone for us is going to be when we start to migrate our existing ANZ customers onto Plus in a scaled way. We're not ready to talk about that today, but it is something we are actively planning for. We're targeting 2025”.
There are two schools of thought on Plus: one, that it's well behind schedule; the other, that this is the way big tech projects should be rolled out, with a focus on getting things right rather than tight deadlines. The truth is obviously in the middle but the data show the first phase of the platform, with growing deposits and transactions, has solid momentum.
The main point of the update was a new home loan, mooted as a key product 18 months ago when Plus launched but arriving somewhat later than expected (according to analysts) or on schedule after a complex build and long period of beta testing (according to Carnegie).
