Westpac's Group CTO exits

Westpac’s group chief technology officer of six-and-a-half years David Walker has left the bank, with his responsibilities divvied up among existing and new technology leaders.

David Walker.

The bank confirmed Walker’s departure to iTnews.

It appears there are no plans to recruit a replacement CTO and that the role will be discontinued.

Westpac’s CIO of two-and-a-half years Scott Collary, whom Walker reported to, remains the bank’s top technology leader.

Some responsibilities that previously fell to the CTO will be given to a new general manager of enterprise platform engineering, named internally as Rob Marchiori, who started at the bank this week.

Marchiori has spent the past four years at IT services giant Cognizant but is perhaps better known for a near-decade stint at ANZ where, among other things, he led a group-wide transformation “to new ways of working and cloud”.

Walker also had AI leadership responsibilities at Westpac, which have since been handed to chief data, digital and AI officer, Andrew McMullan, who moved over from CBA mid last year.

Six-and-a-half year stint

Walker arrived at Westpac in August 2019 with a mandate to simplify banking operations and foster innovation. 

He’d spent the previous decade at Singapore’s DBS Bank driving digital transformation.

At Westpac Walker championed, among other things, technology simplification and AI.

Appearing in a 2021 iTnews Podcast episode, Walker emphasised purpose-driven transformation approaches, evergreen platforms and talent development. 

This led the bank to adopt microservices and backend modernisation to enable faster frontend innovations. 

Walker presided over the bank’s early work around enterprise AI, spanning the adoption of tools like Microsoft and GitHub Copilots, and agent-driven services.

It’s understood that Walker has been pursuing a range of advisory, research, speaking and education projects since his departure.