Westpac Outlines St George IT Integration Strategy

Westpac is to derive much of its future IT innovation and costs savings from a cross pollination of IT systems between itself and St George, which was acquired by the bank last year.

Speaking in Web cast on the bank’s financial results yesterday, Westpac CEO Gail Kelly said its integration strategy and IT roadmap with St.George had evolved over the past six months.

“It involves a little bit of re-use of St.George systems into Westpac and the reverse,” Kelly said. “It will also involve, where we think it appropriate, actually migrating both or moving both to a new world.”

Kelly said she had set group executive, retail and business banking, Peter Hanlon, and his team to work in assessing whether it could integrate St George’s teller system, Spider, throughout Westpac’s branches.

“We are working up the business case to make sure that that makes sense… that [it] works to deliver great customer service and bring that across into Westpac that actually sorely needs a new teller system,” she said.

“If we didn’t do that we would have to in fact go out and get a new teller system for Westpac.”

The bank was also eyeing of St George’s CRM system, Firefly, which is attached to Spider, and its HR portal, HR Express, Kelly said.

“HR Express…which is the second most used application in the St.George world, is another example that we will be moving and using across the whole of the Westpac Group,” she said.

Kelly said in the opposite direction, Westpac would look to take its finance system and treasury system and migrate it to St George. The two banks would also look to develop a joint internet banking facility.

“Our priority is going to be the customer facing systems of the bank, be they telling, CRM, internet, payments, those are going be priorities for the next phase,” she said. “Beyond that we’d actually move to the core banking piece.”