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Westpac signs five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to transform into ‘future-ready bank’

Portrait image of Steven Worrall
Steven Worrall, Managing Director, Microsoft ANZ

I am excited to share the news that Westpac has today announced a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to help drive the bank’s digital and hybrid multi-cloud strategy. The partnership includes the bank selecting Azure to help Westpac continue to modernise its technology environment and expand use of cloud-based systems.

Microsoft’s integrated clouds are helping accelerate the bank’s digital transformation, reduce complexity and reflect its ‘built-to-change’ strategy, allowing the bank to respond rapidly to customer, employee and market needs.

Microsoft has worked closely with Westpac in recent years, transitioning a growing number of its critical Data and Customer insights platforms to Azure, including its business critical Data Driven Experiences Platform and real-time customer insights platform.

A great example of this is the unique innovation being built using world leading Data and Service Mesh principles. The partnership is uplifting the data and API platform onto Azure’s evergreen cloud-native data platform-as-a-service, which includes services such as Azure Synapse, AKS, Cosmos DB and API Management (APIM). This is providing Westpac with best in class Data and AI customer insights to enable unique customer interactions and benefits whilst ensuring world leading security and privacy.

Westpac is also leveraging best-in-class Azure artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to accelerate the intelligent processing of documents, starting with mortgages, followed by other business processes across the bank’s portfolio. This will help expedite the delivery of important customer services and reduce risk.

In addition, Westpac is leveraging the ecosystem of services available on Azure to bring its application, data and artificial intelligence capabilities together in a more cohesive manner that can be scaled across the enterprise proving unique customer insights and customer engagement.

Westpac Group Chief Technology Officer, David Walker, said; “At Westpac, our standard for all new systems, whether built by ourselves or sourced from others, is to be ‘built to change’ using ‘evergreen’ cloud-native technologies.”

Just as importantly, it also involves training and education for Westpac engineers on all Microsoft technologies including Azure through Microsoft’s Enterprise Skilling Initiative, which provides curated learning pathways matched to roles, and certification.

Throughout the new hybrid working normality, Teams is the place where Westpac employees do their work, from home or in the office – many using Microsoft Surface devices and the Azure VDI solution on Citrix cloud. Westpac users all leverage Microsoft’s collaboration platform Microsoft 365 E5. This provides best in class collaboration but also enhanced security through a simplified security estate.

The Teams environment has expanded into the central workspace providing applications from the Power Platform and thirdparties. The world leading Westpac Teams Calling solution has also been rolled out across Westpac, and powers the bank’s 800+ branches, simplifying the employees experience and allowing flexibility to respond to  the unique challenges brought about by the pandemic. This solution builds upon and compliments the expansion of Microsoft Dynamics 365 in Westpac’s Contact Centre to provide an enhanced Customer Engagement experience.

All the solutions across the Microsoft cloud services and hybrid-multi-cloud are underpinned by an array of Azure services including Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This enables Westpac to deliver an evergreen, secure, and continuously compliant solution, wherever the data may reside.

Westpac has a clear vision for the future of banking – combining high performance, trusted and secure cloud-based platforms with a highly skilled workforce to allow iterative innovation that will ensure the bank stays at the leading edge of financial services.

Microsoft is delighted to help build the digital foundations for this and support Westpac to grow its learning culture and instil digital capabilities that keep it match-fit for the future of banking.