Highlights

  • Westpac and Microsoft get into a five-year partnership to leverage cloud-based systems into the bank for development.
  • The bank has a further plan to leverage AI and ML capabilities for document processing and improve other processes across the bank’s portfolio.

Westpac signed a five-year contract with Microsoft. The tech giant will help the bank (Westpac) keep on serving its digital and hybrid multi-cloud strategy.

The partnership brings in reform – Westpac taking the help of Microsoft Azure to expand cloud-based systems and bring its application, AI capabilities, and data together in the right pattern that can be scaled across the enterprise.

To support the collaboration and working together, Westpac engineers will receive training and education on Azure technologies under Microsoft’s enterprise skilling program.

The recent deal between the companies will strengthen their relationship as Microsoft assists Westpac transfer its data and customer insights platforms to Azure, comprising its data-powered experiences platform and real-time consumer insights platform.

Also, Westpac leverages Azure Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities to process documents, starting with mortgages, with plans to expand it to other business processes throughout the bank’s portfolio.

Last week, Bank of America announced a major restructuring that will see the company’s technical support function move to a new division known as customer services and technology.

As per Westpac CEO Peter King, the restructure was to not only cut costs by AUD 8 million by 2024, but also expected to enhance the bank’s customer service levels.

Experts’ view

“We are looking to significantly scale up our use of the cloud across the bank, especially with software-as-a-service partners to help deliver more digital-to-the-core experiences for customers. This includes areas such as digital, mortgages, business lending, our banking-as-a-service platform, artificial intelligence, and data,” Westpac CTO David Walker said.

“This partnership will be valuable in enhancing our real-time data and insights capabilities, building on our data-driven experiences platform which is currently being uplifted onto Azure’s evergreen cloud-native data platform-as-a-service.”

“The new training and development opportunities will also provide benefits in terms of upskilling and driving innovation, and help our people become future-ready.”