ANZ's IT efficiency dividend

ANZ is feeding the efficiency dividends it is earning from technology improvements back into its annual A$1.2 billion computing budget.

Over the last three years investments in operations and technology have decreased the bank's operations costs from $81,000 per full time employee in 2012, to $77,000 by 2013, and $68,000 this year.

ANZ chief financial officer Shayne Elliott said technology was the biggest single driver of productivity and improved customer experience across the bank.

Of the $1.2 billion annual technology budget, 54 per cent is spent on digitisation and technology to support product lines such as payments and lending. Of the remainder, 15 per cent is devoted to process automation workflow, 19 per cent on infrastructure security and 12 per cent on risk.

While technology continues to deliver efficiencies, ANZ has been without a chief information officer since Anne Weatherston left the role in April. And while the bank has rolled out a series of common technology platforms to support its operations across Asia, it has not embarked on a major technology transformation project or a replacement of its core banking platform.

It instead claims to be focused on "building common technology platforms to drive standardisation, simplification and automation."

Driving cost out is important, but using technology to grow revenues is critical in a competitive market. This explains the bank's focus in the area of data analytics. ANZ has been growing its global customer registry, now rolled out across 25 countries with more than 12 million customer records, and has also established a bank wide data warehouse.

Its access to customer information will be boosted further with the rollout of IBM's Watson Engagement Advisor Tool to more than 400 financial planners, who will take information from customers, feed that into the Watson engine, and turn it into tailored financial advice.

The bank believes this will reduce the time taken to deliver a statement of advice to customers from weeks to just a single session.

ANZ has already had some success using technology to shorten the sales process of its global asset finance team where a new core platform has cut the sales process from days to minutes.

Initially focused on insurance and protection advice, the Watson service will be extended to superannuation and investments.

Customer appetite for computer aided banking remains strong. ANZ was the first of the big banks to launch a mobile banking app, and the bank last week said that goMoney had now processed more than $100 billion worth of transactions since its launch in September 2010.