ANZ's transformation GM Rob Marchiori to exit

ANZ’s transformation GM Rob Marchiori will leave the bank mid next month and remaining agile ways of work teams will be folded into the technology organisation, the latest changes to occur as agile simply becomes part of the bank’s ‘business-as-usual’.

iTnews sighted an internal memo from ANZ’s group executive for technology Gerard Florian announcing the change, as well as others, primarily around the bank’s new ways of working (NWOW) transformation.

“After 10 years with ANZ, Rob Marchiori will be leaving ANZ in mid-October to look for his next challenge,” Florian wrote.

“In that time, Rob helped launch our payments transformation, led the Institutional Technology team and more recently took on the challenge of transforming the bank to an agile way of working.

“He has been a driving force in setting sustainable foundations to an agile way of working that will ensure it thrives well into the future.”

In addition to agile, Marchiori’s transformation efforts also extended across ANZ’s cloud adoption, as well as its newer transformation program, ANZx.

News of Marchiori’s departure comes less than a month after Robert Westwood, who spent several years responsible for the agile transformation of ANZ’s Technology function, left to take up a role with Canadian institution TD.

NWOW and agile are considered to be largely bedded down in ANZ’s Australian operations.

Florian said that remaining Ways of Working teams are being embedded in ANZ’s technology business.

“We’re making a number of changes to the teams in the Ways of Working (WoW) portfolio, folding them into the broader technology team,” he wrote. 

“More specifically, people will move to employee experience under Miranda Kovacic; technology business management under Hamish McKenzie; or technology assurance under Stephen O’Reilly.

“For me, this is a sign of how far we’ve come since we first announced more than three years ago that we were ‘blowing up bureaucracy’ and moving to more agile ways of working. 

“I’ve been saying for a while that we can’t keep calling it ‘new’ forever – it’s simply the way we work now, which is why it makes sense to embed teams such as the one that manages Jira and Confluence, our coaching CoE [centre of excellence] and others, into the [ANZ] tech business.”

New chief architect, CoE

Outside of transformation, Florian also flagged several areas of upcoming investment for ANZ’s technology business.

The bank will invest in both engineering and architecture, and has appointed Tim Hogarth as its new chief architect. Hogarth comes from Canada’s TD Bank.

“Tim will lead a centre of excellence for architecture and engineering (extending the great work already done by the architecture CoE) with increased focus on application standards and engineering standards,” Florian said.

“[He] has a mandate to drive a greater positive impact through alignment and standards by providing our tech areas with the right guidance on how to build solutions at ANZ.”

Florian also said ANZ would make some investments around customer experience (CX) “in the coming weeks and months”, and would also continue work to reduce handoffs between different parts of the technology business.