The rebranding of St George branches as Bank of Melbourne branches will produce more income per customer for Westpac in Victoria, the chief executive of the bank's BOM brand told
Business Spectator.
Scott Tanner, CEO of the latest branding initiative by Westpac, said, in an interview published on Friday, that "If you look at the market share that we're targeting, the number of branches that we're deploying out there, they are really being designed for interaction rather than transaction.
"Today... a lot of transactional traffic actually goes online or via mobile channels, or via call centres. We can deploy new branches in an open branch format, with skilled relationship managers, financial planners and local business managers in those branches who are really selling to customers, rather than having to deal with transactions."
Last month, Westpac confirmed two-year old rumours of a revival of the Bank of Melbourne brand, which the bank abandoned in 2004, seven years after taking over the bank. The rationale for the revival is the opportunity to appeal to (supposedly) under-fulfilled demand for services from regional bank brands in Victoria.
Tanner said that nationally an average of 22 per cent of the market banks with a regional bank. And 13 percent of this market is held, on average, by state-based banking champions.
In Victoria, these percentages are 13 per cent and six per cent, respectively.
Given Westpac's assessment of the opportunity, there will be no constraint on the BOM branch rollout. (Westpac has said it will triple the number of St George branches in Victoria as the rebranding kicks in, from August 2011).
Tanner said: "The network rollout is not going to be influenced by where Westpac branches are. It's going to be influenced solely by where we can see the market opportunity to be for us.
"The preference that customers have expressed for a local regional offering is not geographically limited. Those customers are everywhere. They just haven't been able to get that offering in the marketplace in the recent past, and so we'll be putting branches in the places that are going to be most convenient for those customers and, hopefully, they'll flock to those branches."
In a separate interview with information technology title,
ZDNet, Westpac's chief technology officer, Sarv Girn, clarified aspects of the investment in core banking systems planned for Bank of Melbourne.
Girn said that when the Bank of Melbourne does go live it will sport an upgraded version of the Hogan core banking system. Girn said this core would not be the latest version, which is known as Celerity. Instead, the Bank of Melbourne will receive what Girn calls "Hogan Plus", an optimised version of St George's current core infrastructure.
"The version we're deploying across the Bank of Melbourne is an enhanced version of what's running in St George and the Bank of South Australia, and that enhancement is really to ensure we cater for another bank and another brand," he told ZDNet.
"Our prime focus at the moment is to get Bank of Melbourne out. Once that's out, from August, we will commence our [transformation] program on... [Celerity], but we're already doing our preliminary work," Girn said.