ANZ has launched its new digital brand ANZ Plus, promising a range of money management tools to complement a core transaction and savings account offering. Key features include the ability to sign up “in minutes”, spending categorisation, money insights presented in the app, billing alerts, financial goal setting and tracking, and “ANZ Plus coaches available in-app” for support. Last year, when ANZ chief executive Shayne Elliott announced the development of ANZ Plus, he said it would ultimately include a fully digital home loan offering. He said ANZ Plus will include partnerships with third parties to provide additional financial and non-financial products. The focus will be on financial coaching and personal financial management. Elliott said in a statement yesterday: “The release of ANZ Plus marks the beginning of a multi-year plan to provide modern, digital products and services for our customers and significantly better systems and processes for ANZ.” While Elliott and his new head of retail Maile Carnegie hope ANZ Plus will position the bank as a digital innovator and help rid it of the poor image it has earned from its clunky home lending processes, the launch has had its share of problems. It has taken longer to come to market than expected and customer feedback on forums like Whirlpool is not all that positive, with most describing it as a generic money management app. ANZ Plus does not appear to make use of open banking. One user complained that they would have to use the account for all their spending to get value out of the budgeting tools, whereas an app using open banking would draw banking data from other accounts.