Major bank embarks on ‘large-scale tech transformation’

Westpac has moved its business’ core processing to an offset private cloud, according to its chief information officer Dave Curran.

“[Its] first business application went live at the end of March this year,” Mr Curran told Mortgage Business. “We have around 20 others going live in the next eight months and we’re targeting 40 per cent of our business applications to be on an offsite private cloud by 2020.”

Mr Curran explained that the process is building on what the banking group has been working on previously.

“We’ve been talking about cloud for eight to 10 years now and we’ve been using the public cloud for commodity services, for example web content management,” he said.

The move is a “large-scale technology and cultural transformation”, which will allow the group to be “more agile” in meeting customers’ needs and creating value, according to Mr Curran.

“What took months to provision now takes days and most importantly helps bring customer solutions to market quicker,” he explained. “With increased automation and process improvement, we will see significant cost savings and efficiency gains… our solutions have greater resilience and they won’t break as often as traditional systems.”

Mr Curran noted that in undertaking the task, the bank ensured its security controls were “solid”.

“Our teams had to make sure that this is even more secure and resilient than current solutions,” he elaborated. “We have tested and proven this – hence we’re live.”

He added that he believes the company will have moved its core business across to the public cloud in less than 10 years, however will stay on the private cloud until it proves that public is more secure and resilient.

[Related: Banks recognise benefit of open data]