ANZ combines its digital and retail divisions

ANZ has announced it is re-merging its digital and retail divisions into one unit, as the bank gets closer to launching its customer-facing app, ANZ Plus.

ANZ Plus is a new digital banking service that contains a range of in-built financial management tools. It will now become part of the merged ANZ Retail division.

Group executive digital banking, Maile Carnegie, will take on the title of group executive Australian retail, reporting to ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott.

The changes will also see the bank split its Australian commercial business into a new division aimed at building future opportunities.

Elliott will take charge of that operation while the team looks to replace group executive for Australia retail and commercial banking, Mark Hand. 

In an ANZ Bluesnotes post, Elliott said “four or five years ago, it was pretty apparent to us when we were thinking about the future and the changing shape of banking…. that the world looked very different”.

“When we identified what customers were going to want in the future, what competition was going to demand of us, what regulators were going to demand of us, we realised the infrastructure and the way we were running the business really wasn't a contemporary way of doing that and we weren't going to get to where we needed to be.”

This led to work undertaken by a team called ANZx to develop a new banking product.

“Now we're on the verge of launching our first big proposition into market under a new brand called ANZ Plus and so it's entirely appropriate that we re-merge our retail offering,” Elliott said.

“It really is going to lay the foundations for the future ANZ and what [we] will be about for the next 10 years and beyond.”

In a separate statement, Elliott said the bank “recognised retail banking was changing fast” and ANZ “needed to use the world’s best digital technology to deliver a customer proposition …while also improving the speed and resilience of our operations.”

“At the time, we established our new digital division outside of our Australian retail business to ensure we weren’t being limited by existing structures and technology,” Elliott said.

“Our intention was to always bring this work together when it made sense and given our first customer proposition, ANZ Plus, is about to go live, that time is now.”

Consumers can currently join the waitlist for the ANZ Plus banking app, which offers uses a suite of financial management tools and is expected to officially launch in the upcoming months.

“ANZ Plus, which was built under the ANZx program, is a critical foundation in our digital transformation as we look to improve the services we provide our retail customers in Australia," Elliott wrote.

“It is a digital-led retail banking proposition centered on the financial wellbeing of our customers.”