Any competitive edge ANZ believes may accrue from being one of around a dozen early adopters of IBM's Watson cognitive computing platform may shortly evaporate with the official Australian launch of the service yesterday.ANZ's wealth division was one of a small cohort of international financial service providers that joined the early adopter program late last year, alongside the Royal Bank of Canada and USAA. The initial ANZ project has been led by Joyce Phillips, CEO for ANZ Global Wealth, and group managing director of marketing, innovation and digital. The project has explored how Watson can provide support to ANZ's financial planners when they deal with customers seeking insurance products.Yesterday, IBM also demonstrated a mobile implementation of the Watson service that will allow bank customers to type in a natural language query to their bank's Watson application. This would then guide them through the process, for example, of applying for a mortgage. The computer giant has identified the financial services sector as one of the primary targets for the service, which can quickly make sense of and help leverage a bank's collection of customer data, by providing clearer insights into who the customer is and what the customer wants. It can then find the best-matched service the bank can provide. Alex Boorman, research director of finance sector analyst RFi Australia, said Watson could help banks establish closer relationships with customers. He said that bank customers were abandoning the branch network out of a sense of frustration because of the delays in service or gaps in the knowledge of front-line staff. By providing a Watson interface to branch staff, it might be possible to speed up service and also have better informed branch staff.He also believed the tool could support banks in their ambition to have more people open accounts or sign up for new products online. He said that while many people were comfortable managing existing bank products from their mobile devices far fewer used mobiles to sign up for a new banking product."This technology has the capability to expedite the mobile application," said Boorman."Finally, the cross-sell: all banks are trying to deal with this, but front-line staff do not, generally, have a good view of the customer." Watson could be used to provide bank tellers with more insight into customers and so support cross-selling, Boorman said.