Westpac New Zealand is positioning itself to stand out by focusing heavily on mobile-friendly banking.
Through its Global App Challenge, the bank is crowdsourcing ideas for the next generation of mobile and web banking applications, offering a NZD$100,000 prize for the best concept.
According to Simon Pomeroy, Westpac NZ’s head of digital, traditional banking has been slow to change because the core of banking has remained largely the same for decades.
“If you boil banking down to its grassroots, it’s still been the same since day one,” Pomeroy says. “What’s changing now is that technology is genuinely altering the way we bank.”
Westpac wants to be at the forefront of that change. Its Cash Tank service, which lets customers check their balance with a single tap, is being trialled on Google Glass and smartwatches, and the bank is introducing iBeacons in some branches.
Pomeroy explains that Westpac’s approach is driven by experimentation and finding which features best fit each device.
“We take about a million phone calls a year asking ‘what’s my balance?’” he notes. “That’s not only inconvenient for customers, it’s also costly for the bank.”
“Cash Tank now receives about 40 million hits a year. People tap it multiple times a day to track spending and check their balances.”
“For us, it’s about experimenting with different devices to see the functionality they offer. I couldn’t imagine doing full internet banking on a watch, but simple tasks like a balance check are ideal for a smartwatch,” he adds.
Pomeroy’s view on mobile banking goes further: he rejects the idea that smaller screens should necessarily mean reduced functionality in banking apps.
“Our approach is the opposite,” he says. “We ask: how can we enable people to perform 90–100% of what they can do in a branch or call centre today using a mobile phone—and then how do we scale that to provide a consistent experience across phone, tablet, and PC?”
Technology does sometimes fail despite careful planning—Westpac Australia, for example, had to apologise in late January after users experienced problems with desktop, mobile and tablet online banking—and the banking sector faces many competing technical options.
From NFC to EMV, there is no single standard. “It’s a case of which horses you back,” Pomeroy explains. “In our industry you’ll see different banks pursuing different directions, which is unlike other industries where there tends to be more uniformity.”
One tactic Westpac is using is crowdsourcing innovation. The Global App Challenge launched in New Zealand six months ago and was so successful that the bank chose three winners instead of one.
The winners came from diverse backgrounds: a checkout supervisor, a retiree with no prior technology experience, and a pair of professional animators.
Pomeroy points out that winning the NZD$100,000 prize didn’t require advanced technical skills—rather, successful entrants understood real pain points in the banking experience.
“When we launched the challenge we weren’t sure who would enter,” he says. “None of the three winners were developers in the traditional sense, but each had a clear appreciation of the problems they’d experienced themselves or observed in others.”
He adds that every winning entry shared three key qualities: simplicity, excellent customer experience, and a believable case for how the idea would make a meaningful difference for customers.
It’s that emphasis on practical improvement that Westpac NZ hopes will give it an advantage as banking evolves.
The Westpac NZ Global App Challenge concludes on February 28 at 5pm NZ time.