Westpac, CUA and AFG finance finalists for Benchmark Awards 2020

A year of horror headlines dominating finance sector doesn’t mean there wasn’t a heap of good work being done under the hood at institutions and providers across Australia, as long running transformations and new platforms all started to deliver.

In a year that saw the majors finally flip to Apple Pay, phones become wallets and the starter’s pistol finally fired on Open Banking, there was never going to be a shortage of gritty and innovative projects worthy of recognition.

Projects for this year’s finalists range across a cutting edge process automation, an enterprise-wide customer service platform rebuild and a ground-up online insurance product redesign and rebuild that replaced friction with solid returns.

Stay tuned this week as we announce finalists in the remaining categories, including federal government, diversity and young leader.

iTnews Benchmark Awards 2020 Finance Finalists

CUA Health insurance online application

Insurance is no stranger to legacy and at CUA it was finally time to draw a line under an application process that relied on the unholy trinity of paper, phone and the internet finally had to go.

But with a lot at stake, the question was how to make both the back end hum and the front end sing so that the user experience was matched with transactional performance, with a time to quote down to 30 seconds.

Westpac customer service hub

A single view of the customer has always been the Holy Grail of modern banking, and Westpac’s new customer service hub is delivering for customers and staff alike.

Critically, the first part of Australia’s oldest bank off the transformation blocks is home lending and mortgages that’s undergone radical simplification, and standardisation after going end-to-end digital… all at a time when all lending systems are being put to the test.

AFG Assess

With interest rates at record lows, secured lending broker and aggregator AFG has moved to carve out a point of difference from the majors by making it easier for loan applicants to demonstrate serviceability through better document versioning history and accessibility.

That’s a huge leap for people navigating their way through the cumbersome and often repetitive, document intensive world of secured lending where small changes in personal data can make a big difference on approvals.