‘Make development fun again’: Westpac’s innovation mission

“There is a lot of opportunity [to strip out costs] because there is still a lot of manual processing and manual control environments and things that we’re just going to continue to set them up and knock them down, so we can invest the money elsewhere.”

Like most other large institutions, Westpac has long laboured to get itself in a position to take advantage of the vast troves of data stored across its old legacy systems, which were built well before the modern cloud computing era.

Pilot program

Former chief information officer Dave Curran piloted an extensive project to create a customer service hub that lets modern technology systems sit over the top of old ones. Mr Collary said it was now working well to let his staff focus on development of new services, rather than maintenance of old ones.

“Westpac might be a little bit unique in being able to take costs out because we did have some redundant infrastructure. So for us the simplification is about how we can go to something more modern in one step,” he said.

“We are looking across the bank and asking ourselves how to take things that were running duplicative across the infrastructure and pick the one that’s the best version of ourselves.”

Mr Collary said the bank was looking to have an “evergreen” technology environment, which meant that in the future, incremental changes would be made to its operations, rather than the mammoth system upgrades that have characterised Australian banking tech in recent decades.

He said despite the cost focus, he was still hiring aggressively in certain areas, such as financial crimes and fraud operations, data skills, cybersecurity and payments.

“Ultimately my goal is to make development fun again.”

— Scott Collary, Westpac.

Last year, Westpac’s chief financial officer, Michael Rowland, bemoaned bottlenecks and wage inflation caused by an inability to find relevant tech skills readily. Mr Collary said plans to bring previously outsourced services back in-house were being slowed by longer hiring times.

“We’re seeing the same thing everyone else is, where we’ve got other industries that are now more focused on digital and data like banks have been for ages, so it’s not just other banks that we are competing against,” he said.

“We are even competing with some of our partners that we work with locally for the same people, where we didn’t have to before.”

Mr Collary said Westpac was a relatively attractive proposition for talented tech workers, and was spreading its efforts out across the country. He said a new tech engineering hub in Brisbane had been inundated with hundreds of applications for its first round of hiring.

He said Westpac was trying to appeal to such workers by offering flexible conditions and fewer restrictions than it had in the past, such as the types of devices people used for their jobs.

Make development fun again

In addition to technology graduate programs in cybersecurity, data and digital engineering, Westpac will add two new specialisms in robotics and intelligent automation.

Mr Collary said cloud computing partnerships with companies such as  Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, and the increasingly sidelined legacy systems, meant the focus of his tech teams – aside from cost reduction – could now be much more creative and focused on competing with fintechs on customer friendly services.

“Ultimately my goal is to make development fun again; when I started 30 years ago you could do everything yourself. You could call somebody in product, write it down on a piece of paper, code it, show it to them, run the test, do some database updates and put it into production the next weekend yourself,” he said.

“Then with all the specialisation and the proliferation of channels and systems we have got so much tighter.

“While we can’t endorse doing it that old way any more because we need controls in place, we are getting back to a place where development is fun.

“Development engineers don’t want to have to worry about whether they’re working with agile or waterfall [methodologies] or if they are doing things on-prem or off-prem, they want to just come in and work on business solutions, that is what most of them love.”