Case study: Bendigo and Adelaide Bank consolidates 15 million documents into one platform

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank had 15 million documents across disparate systems and found a way to consolidate them onto one single platform.

Nathalie Moss, practice lead, lending technology at Bendigo and Adelaide Bank told Digital Nation acquiring several businesses presented the challenge of having information across different systems.

She explained that each acquisition meant a different process which created a copious amount of documents.

“Our documents were managed and stored inconsistently across our business areas, across the brands and across the systems,” she said.

“With this piece of work, our goal was to set up an enterprise capability, something that was easy to load documents, store documents, find documents, and free up the bankers to support our customers.

"And to provide consistent customer experience to have the bankers not get bogged down in admin tasks.”

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank selected Infosys and Microsoft for the document migration journey. Moss said it began through 2021 and 2022 building out capabilities.

“The migration found documents from Alliance Bank, Delphi Bank, Rural Bank, Adelaide Bank, Business Bank, and Retail Wealth,” she said.

“We're pulling from all different document repositories all over the place. There were different requirements for each of those, consolidation work and migration work happened through that time.”

Having those new patterns now, Moss explained when they acquire any new businesses, it simplifies the process.

“We also managed to acquire a new business quite recently this year, which was the Leveraged Wealth business that came from another bank,” she said.

“We were able to use those repeatable patterns to just pull all their documents in as well. We've got that system working for us now.”

This new platform has also allowed Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s staff to focus on customers rather than manual, arduous tasks.

“It is all about the customers, how we support them, how we service them, how we protect them. From a servicing and support point of view, through the automation that we're using we've got the ease of use of the document management system,” Moss explained.

“That's freed up our bankers and our customer-facing staff to focus on the customer and not get bogged down in all the manual and admin tasks”

One of the principles the bank has is “digital by design, and human where it matters”. Moss explained from this principle, they wanted to automate as much as they possibly could.  

“The customer doesn't need us and the bank can have things that happen automatically. But we want to be there when the customer does need us. That means freeing up the bankers so that they can be the human when it matters, that was central,” she said.

Privacy and security is paramount to Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, Moss explained they are focused on protecting customer data so they have simplified the environment.

“We've improved how much time it takes, we’ve improved the accuracy and we've improved the consistency,” she said.

“Before you had people doing things five different ways for five different people because it's automated, it's consistent across the board.”

This new platform has helped the bank retain high NPS scores.

“Certainly, our business users are finding it a lot easier to use the system and to be able to find documents relating to a customer and get that more holistic customer view,” Moss said.

“Hopefully, that's continuing to give us a great reputation in the market around how we treat our customers and help them.”