ANZ New Zealand(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 3

Senior IS executive: Peter Lawrence, CIO
Reports to: Jenny Fagg, CEO
Size of IS shop: 600

PCs: 9000
Mobile PCs: 2900
Terminals: 3500
Hand-held devices: 500
Total screens: 15,900

Industry: Finance and insurance
PC environment: Windows 2000, XP; HP; Dell
Server environment: HP; Dell; Tandem; Sun; IBM; Windows 2000, 2003; Citrix; AIX
DBMS: SQL, DB2, Oracle, Sybase
Address: Level 15, 215-229 Lambton Quay, Wellington
Website: www.anznational.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Not disclosed.

ANZ New Zealand’s technology focus during the past year has been aligned with the bank’s strategy of supporting customers through the global financial crisis.

While there has been an emphasis on cost management to support jobs and banking services, the internal focus has been on using existing smart technology to drive efficiencies, such as increasing the use of video conferencing for internal meetings to avoid travel, instant messaging capability and desktop sharing for collaboration. Over the past 12 months ANZ has also focused on completing some key infrastructure projects to support local banking operations. ANZ’s new $78 million datacentre located in Auckland opened in April. It supports more than 40 percent of the country’s financial transactions, such as EFTPOS, ATM and online banking.
“Having robust and stable technology systems underpinning our operations is mission critical to delivering a good customer experience,” says ANZ New Zealand CIO Peter Lawrence.

“The 4000 metre2 purpose-built facility houses what is believed to be the most advanced datacentre in the country and sets the benchmark for others, while complementing ANZ’s other datacentres in Melbourne and Singapore.” The datacentre increases ANZ’s capacity to support future business growth and supports ANZ’s super regional strategy to become a major Asia-Pacific bank. The project was completed on time and under budget.

A VoIP programme was also completed in 2009 that replaces multiple legacy voice and data networks throughout ANZ New Zealand. This project was particularly challenging in scale and complexity and is understood to be one of New Zealand’s largest VoIP deployment programmes.

Other major projects include the delivery of new ANZ concept branches. These new look branches deliver both staff assisted service and the secure 24x7 zone enabling customers to do their banking any time. They have ‘intelligent’ ATMs that can take cash and cheque deposits without envelopes, as well as coin deposit facilities, phone direct access, and ANZ internet banking kiosks. Wireless technology is being trialed internally to support a flexible working environment.

The recession has highlighted the need for strong performance measures and good governance around decision-making. The increased drive for value and sensible cost management is important, and balancing technology spend between compliance, innovation and growth is critical to maintaining momentum and managing through down times.

ANZ New Zealand is primarily an in-sourced technology department for both operations and development, with supply arrangements with a suite of preferred suppliers.