This year's crop of Finance finalists in the iTnews Benchmark Awards typified a problem the country's biggest banks have been grappling with for years: how to keep up with fast-changing customer demands when saddled with ageing IT infrastructure.
A "massively changing environment", according to Westpac's John Cooper, in which customers want anytime, anywhere access to their account means banks have been left without much choice but to sink time and money into ensuring their infrastructure can meet these demands.
For Westpac, ANZ Bank and Herron Todd White, this meant getting rid of legacy and inefficient IT.
The financial organisations talked through the challenges of innovating in a tightly-regulated industry and taking the plunge with new technologies at the panel sessions of the 2016 iTnews Benchmark Awards.
