ANZ exec Florian: Banks must use tech to improve how customer data is managed

ANZ’s Gerard Florian says banks must use technology to improve how customer data is managed.

ANZ group executive technology Gerard Florian. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

The banking sector needs to use technology to not just offer new digital products to their customers but also improve how their data is managed inside the banks, ANZ Bank’s technology boss Gerard Florian says.

Mr Florian told The Weekend Australian that technology had an important role to play in bringing all of the customer data and systems together to deliver better outcomes for consumers.

“The role of technology is any financial service organisation is going to increase, it’s a fact of life, the potential is there, but we will need to work together inside an organisation.”

While there’s no shortage of the technology solutions that banks have at their disposal, Mr Florian said their full potential is often overlooked when it comes to managing risks.

“The way compliance has been done in the past has relied on people with checklists looking over your shoulder, but as we move into a more automated world, we have to think about it differently.”

Mr Florian’s comments come in the wake of the banking royal commission’s interim report, released a week ago, which highlighted a shortcoming in the sector, particularly NAB, CBA and Westpac, when it came to producing data related to alleged misconduct.

According to the report, the inadequate responses from the banks hinted at a weakness when it came to leveraging technology for compliance and risk management internally.

“NAB’s apparent inability to draw together information about instances of misconduct identified during the immediately preceding five years shows that it was then unable to identify promptly, whether for its own internal purposes or for any external purpose, a single, reasonably comprehensive and accurate picture of whether and how it had failed to comply with applicable financial services laws,” the report said.

“On the face of it, information of that kind would be important not only for managing compliance with those laws but also for identifying whether separate events stemmed from similar causes.

“The difficulties raised by NAB, and by others, about meeting the Commission’s requests suggest that those entities deal with regulatory compliance piecemeal rather than comprehensively,” it added.

Mr Florian said the issue raised by the report drills into a key challenge for organisations as they become more digital.

“Historically things were siloed along the lines of profit and loss, but as customer expectations rise they want the organisations to know them not just vertically but also horizontally,” Mr Florian said. “So understanding the life cycle of a customer — their past, present and their future needs — is an important part of what has been referred to in some discussions as it relates to the commission,” he added.

When it comes to risk, Mr Florian, a former senior executive at global IT services firm Dimension Data, said users of technology inside a bank also needed to understand how it affected their role.

“Every single person who uses technology, whether you are ­entering in customer data or ­generating reports, needs to take a greater responsibility.”

Another by-product of greater digitisation, and a potentially dangerous one at that, is an overreliance from customers on digital services and an expectation that they should be available all the time.

There’s no silver bullet that guarantees 100 per cent uptime but there is a way to minimise the damage caused by outages.

“It does put more pressure on us and when we said that we wanted tech to have a bigger seat at the table, well now he have it,” Mr Florian said.

With the banking sector falling foul of consumers, the role of technology leaders like Mr Florian is becoming increasingly important to ensure that consumer confidence in their bank’s ability deliver day-to-day services isn’t eroded.

Meanwhile, a new crop of ­digitally savvy neo-banks like Xinja, 86 400 and Volt are actively seeking to steal market share from the traditional players.

Robert Bell, chief executive of 86 400, said that just throwing money into technology no longer guarantees success for the big banks.

“The difference between us and them is that we see the world differently, we are building a mobile bank where everything is delivered on the phone. Compare that to the apps of the banks … they do some stuff OK but they are just a sub-set of what they built 10 years ago for internet banking,” he said. “They have an enormous technology legacy.”

Mr Florian conceded that while legacy was an undeniable challenge for all traditional operators, it wasn’t insurmountable.

According to Mr Florian, shedding the legacy is as much a cultural issue as it’s a technical one.

“The most important thing is the mindset, one that’s more service oriented rather than project or product.”