ASB Group(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 20

Senior IS executive: Russell Jones, chief operations officer
Reports to: Charles Pink, managing director
Size of IS shop: 566

PCs: 6111
Mobile PCs: 877
Terminals: 1419
Hand-held devices: 665
Total screens: 9072

Industry: Finance and insurance
PC environment: Acer, HP, Windows XP
Server environment: HP, Unisys, IBM; Unix; Windows 2000, 2003, AIX; Linux
DBMS: Unisys, SQL, Oracle
Address: Level 28, ASB Bank Centre, 135 Albert Street, Auckland
Website: www.asb.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Not disclosed.

ASB Bank supports banking operations and subsidiary Sovereign Insurance throughout New Zealand with its 566 IT staff members. A significant ICT change for the bank has been the shift from a CIO role to a chief operations role. As a result, COO Russell Jones is now in what many are calling a CIO-plus position. “My role now is really about providing technology and back-office support services to the rest of the bank. We have customers, but they are very similar; we have services; we have payments and costs associated with those services; we have escalation if things go wrong; we have 24-hour support,” he says.

Parent company CBA Group’s CIO Mike Harte revealed in September last year that the organisation has made strong connections between customer satisfaction and IT performance, and at last year’s CIO Summit, ASB NZ COO Jones told attendees, “We now strongly believe innovation is much more about the process than the outcome. It is about customer experience satisfaction and it is about customer engagement.”

The Australian-owned, ASB considers itself very much a New Zealand bank, with its team focused wholly on the needs of its New Zealand customers. “Being a Kiwi bank is about your provenance, the way you think and act as an organisation, your history and your commitment to staff, customers and the community,” general manager of branding and marketing, Deborah Simpson, told The Independent.

The bank will take over sole tenancy of a new building at Auckland’s waterfront Wynyard Quarter, with construction slated to begin next year and occupation planned for 2013.