Westpac customer service hub wins best finance project

Australia's oldest bank has taken out the coveted iTnews Benchmark Award in finance for its work to tackle the Holy Grail of modern banking - a single view of the customer.

Westpac’s new Customer Service Hub has been delivering for customers and staff alike, kicking off with a radical simplification of home lending and mortgages, the most complex area of the multi-brand business.

That involved the consolidation, uplift and rationalisation of more than 23 systems across multiple brands to standardise and unify systems that had served their time well but needed to move with the times.

It’s no small challenge, yet Westpac has stayed the course of its core mission through the building of a unified Customer Service Hub spanning across not only its core umbrella brand but equally St. George, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA.

Rather than sitting as a silo, CSH has been integrated into Westpac Group’s technology ecosystem, as the first step to standardise the back-end systems to give bankers a modern origination platform with a single view of customers across brands, reduce the number of systems used and enable continuous conversations regardless of whether in a branch or online.

Westpac also cites the project as having delivered single view of customer information and loan application status for staff as well as a simplified and digitised application assessment and approval for customers and bankers that deletes cumbersome manual processes.