The new deal focuses on the bank's multi-channel customers and hyper-regional expansion. ANZ Bank has expanded its partnership with IBM by signing a five-year, $450 million contract with the technology giant to maximize productivity and help the bank's regional Asian expansion.
The new contract, which includes access to IBM’s entire software portfolio, aims to help the bank with its rapidly growing number of customers and transactions across the bank’s multiple channels.
As part of the agreement, both ANZ and IBM are investing in a new “innovation lab”. The lab, built on IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering, will enable the bank’s developers to build, test and deploy new applications and services faster and more cheaply.
ANZ’s strategy includes next-generation cloud development capabilities and core infrastructure systems. IBM will deploy the bank’s latest Z13 mainframe and Power8 infrastructure as part of the bank’s private cloud environment.
The expanded alliance will provide common platforms across ANZ’s network as it continues to grow as a hyper-regional bank, and will enable ANZ to deliver a more integrated and innovative banking experience for its “digital” customers, the companies said in a joint statement.
IBM and ANZ have had a 40-year commercial partnership, which included using IBM’s Watson machine learning technology to create personalised product recommendations for ANZ customers.
ANZ has chosen to focus its IT investment on a $1.5 billion upgrade of its online and mobile front-end systems, rather than opting for a complete IT overhaul like rivals Westpac and Commonwealth Bank.
Commenting on the IBM contract, Scott Collary, CIO of ANZ, said: “Understanding our customers’ needs and preferences around mobile and digital banking is vital to our work to deliver a superior customer experience.
“As such, we need to ensure we meet these needs in an innovative, consistent and seamless way and with this partnership with IBM, we are working towards achieving this goal.”
