Shayne Elliott, ANZ's chief executive officer, has been executing a strategy to simplify the banking group's business over the past year or so. Now he has floated the concept that ANZ could become "a 200-year-old start-up". Elliott was speaking off the cuff in an interview with Bloomberg TV's Paul Allen at the AltFi Australasia Summit 2017 in Sydney yesterday. He had just returned from a road trip through Europe, with some of his executive team, where "we saw a bunch of banks in Madrid, Copenhagen and Paris". He concluded that all large banks are dealing with fundamentally the same problems of digital transformation, given the reality that most of their businesses rely on some aspects of legacy systems. "Across the continent there is a dramatically wide set of different approaches. At one extent there are banks that don't even think of themselves as banks, but as technology companies - with all the cultural transformation that comes with that [mindset]; at the other end are those that are taking a much slower approach," he said. "Generally speaking - the further north, the more digital the economies are, and the more transformation we are already seeing." He ranked Australian banking sector as "somewhere in the middle" in digital capability. Elliott also took the opportunity to claim that the biggest difference between ANZ and its big four competitors was "not some app or capability or product. It's cultural". "We've been prepared to take a different approach, even to how we price our credit cards or our approach to mobile wallets." Elliott also said he did not expect P2P marketplace lending to overtake mainstream banking anytime soon, but said they were complimentary parts of the financial sector. Nonetheless, he remained open to partnerships that worked for ANZ - although lending was not top of his list. "We have something that the fintechs don't have - we have customers, five million in Australia alone. And fintechs have something that big banks don't have, which is ideas and technology and a better way of doing things. "Any type of digital transformation partnership for ANZ is likely to be in the area of payments, rather than peer to peer lending. That's something I'd leave to people in this room."