Open-plan on steroids: Bankwest borrows tech sector culture change

There aren’t many major Australian businesses where the managing director has no actual office and little more than a metal stool to sit on.

Welcome to the world of 125-year old start-up Bankwest.

Bankwest squad members.

In a post-banking royal commission Australia trust in banks is at an all-time low.

The inaugural Deloitte Trust Index – Banking 2018 released in October found only one-fifth of customers believed their bank had their interests at heart.

To combat this, banks like ANZ and Bankwest are borrowing management and culture techniques from Silicon Valley and other tech companies to force staff to focus on customers.

The ‘agile’ workforce has been around for more than 20 years and is rife through tech companies like Spotify who use multidisciplinary team structures to get products to market fast.

This is something banks are grappling with. Customers have come to expect tech products to be upgraded frequently and are demanding that same speed from financial institutions.

“A lot of tech-led disruptive organisations have used the agile model to be customer responsive,” said Bankwest experience executive general manager Andrew Chanmugam, who came to the bank from Vodafone.

“When you deploy stuff in the old waterfall world you say 'hey, I think it’s going to cost this much and take this much time and 18 months down the line we will launch something,' but the market has moved in 18 months.

“Doing agile allows you to be responsive and in time and in tune with the market, you can pivot as you go.”

Bankwest managing director Rowan Munchenberg.Credit: FRANCES ANDRIJICH

Lego pencil case and a metal stool

The agile culture extends to Bankwest managing director Rowan Munchenberg whose defined workspace amounts to a metal stool.

He carries his personal items around with him in a Lego pencil case that his children gave him for Christmas.

Mr Munchenberg started at Bankwest two years ago after high-level roles in its parent, the Commonwealth Bank, and has overseen the transformation.

Now they’re working shoulder to shoulder solving problems.

Rowan Munchenberg

He said the best part about the new workforce was dissolution of barriers between divisions.

“The big thing about when you create these multidisciplinary teams you’re bringing together people that haven’t directly interacted as a team before,” he said.

“The technologist that might have sat in a corner would have been waiting for the specification to hit their desk to code it then send it back to someone else. Now they’re working shoulder to shoulder solving problems.”

Mr Munchenberg said the bank would have implemented the new structure whether the Royal Commission happened or not.

“A lot of the changes around the way we work, the way we listen to customers, simplification of the product set, brand and brand positioning ... all of those things would have happened irrespective of the royal commission,” he said.

New vocabulary

Bankwest, whose 1.1 million customer base is split evenly between the west and east coast, began implementing a ‘tribe’ structure throughout its Perth head office at the end of 2017.

It split nearly 1000 staff from a range of backgrounds into five tribes that each have customer-focused goals including everyday banking, licence to operate and achieving financial goals.

The result is an open planned office on steroids crammed with jargon.

The tribes are split into ‘squads’ who have smaller objectives based on customer experiences they want to create that are completed in two week ‘sprints’.

Hotdesking is now a way of life and the walls of every floor are covered in timelines that track the progress of each objective.

Squads can put ‘blockers’ on the timeline that notify management and other squads of issues that are getting in the way of achieving objectives.

Bankwest’s general manager of transformation and tribe leader Debbie Mills led the move to agile and said it has been a tough journey getting 1000 staff on board the new way of working.

“That is a quite mindset difference from what you would have seen traditionally in a bank in a project waterfall type of way,” he said.

“It’s obviously the way fin-tech works all the time but we’re going on a big journey to change a lot of mind sets.

“We’ve worked really hard with our people about what this means day to day and how therefore day to day things need to be different to do that.”

Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of the new culture is prioritising pace over perfect.

Ms Mills points out this is not at the risk of the customer but rather they will release products that might not be fully functional but can still be used by customers.

The launch of Bankwest’s Halo payment ring in January last year is a prime example of the new mindset.

The ring was released only with the ability to pay from everyday transaction accounts and not credit cards.

“It doesn’t mean that perfect isn’t good but it’s not everything,” Ms Mills said.

“To be perfect and take four years isn’t the answer we’re looking for.

“It’s about getting that right balance and learning and improving and using that to drive the speed rather than documenting everything and getting it right the first time.”