Westpac interim CIO resigns

Westpac interim chief information and technology officer Paul Spiteri has resigned from the company, effective October.

Spiteri has worked in senior technology roles at Westpac for over a decade across wealth, superannuation and payments.

He was last employed as a divisional chief information officer covering payments and shared services prior to taking on the acting group CIO role in February.

The bank has been seeking a permanent group CIO since the departure of former CIO Clive Whincup to Woolworths.

“The global search for a new group CIO has been underway for several months,” a Westpac spokesperson told iTnews.

The search was "progressing well", she said, but a hire is still yet to be made.

“Paul has done a tremendous job in progressing our technology roadmap and providing stability and leadership to Westpac Group’s technology leadership team and community,” the spokesperson said.

“We thank Paul for the many contributions he has made to Westpac over the last 14 years and wish him well for the future.”

In his last two roles, Spiteri has presided over several projects that aimed to reduce the cost of delivering IT services to the bank.

Westpac’s sourcing strategy, set in motion by former CIO Bob McKinnon and further by Spiteri, included the appointment of a panel of four offshoring partners in India - IBM (India), Tata Consulting Services, Infosys and Wipro, with a subset of additional services supplied by HCL.

Oracle joined that list when Westpac contracted the company to deliver a 'turn key' solution for its new customer master system, built on the vendor's engineered database machine and maintained and managed by Oracle staff based in India.

Multiple Westpac systems interface with the customer master on a routine basis – but it was delivered primarily to support the bank’s new Fiserv-based online banking front-end, which started its gradual rollout late last year.

The new system vastly outperformed previous solutions. But the project has been unpopular with many inside Westpac IT as it sidelined internal database, security, and service desk teams and risked the future viability for many of these shared service functions.

A spokesperson for Westpac told iTnews all necessary governance procedures were put in place as part of the Oracle deal.