Bank of New Zealand(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 21

Senior IS executive: Peter Yarrington, CIO
Reports to: Paul Tait, general manager banking delivery services
Size of IS shop: 280

PCs: 4395
Mobile PCs: 1320
Terminals: 958
Hand-held devices: 1394
Total screens: 8067

Industry: Finance and insurance
PC environment: HP, IBM, Windows XP
Server environment: HP; IBM; Sun; Windows 2000, 2003, 2008; AIX
DBMS: DB2, Oracle, SQL, Sybase
Address: Level 11, 80 Boulcott Street, Wellington
Website: www.bnz.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Not disclosed.

The Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) has recently undergone a change in leadership, with new CIO Peter Yarrington having taken over ICT control from acting CIO Aaron Toatelegese. Leading edge management and utilisation of best of breed technology remain key objectives.

In an excellent example of collaboration and the use of information technology to enable business strategies, the bank’s Business Intelligence (BI) team, part of the BNZ Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence, has delivered two major web-based projects over the past 12 months. The reporting applications — online profit and loss (Online P&L) and customer portfolio management (CPM) — provide analysis of monthly historical data, drillable down to individual bankers and customer accounts. For these projects, the BNZ was awarded Project Initiative of the Year at the New Zealand inaugural national CFO awards in March.

The projects were first initiated following the inheritance in 2004 by the BI team of central shared service centre solution that was manual, time consuming and did not allow for scalability. According to the award submission, “The Online P&L and CPM applications have provided significant insight and visibility to the organisation in a way that is dynamic, technologically advanced and user-friendly. Prior to these projects, data was static, aggregated and of poor quality for the end user.” Most recently, ROE on a Basel II methodology was added to the applications, building on technology used for Basel I calculations, thereby simplifying data processes and improving infrastructure framework.

The BNZ continues to maintain the majority of its IT operations and functions in-house.