Westpac Live lifts online product sales

Westpac may be earning a fair payback on its recent investments in digital banking and network modernisation, if the data revealed by its head of retail in a speech on Friday is any guide.

Gail McGrath, Westpac's general manager retail, said more than "three million personal customers have been successfully migrated to the new Westpac Live service and we are well underway to moving over our 800,000 business customers this year."

In December more than A$10 billion was processed through Westpac Live, of which 40 per cent was transacted through mobile and tablet, McGrath told the audience at the Australian Banking & Finance Leaders Lecture Series in Sydney.

"Westpac Live is a revamp of the bank's apps for smartphones and tablets and offers customers "self-service features like the ability to change ATM limits, request a mortgage top-up and look at three years of statements in an instant," she said.

The bank has sold more than 70,000 credit card, personal loan and deposits accounts through Westpac Live since the launch.

Innovation and technology provides customers with more choices and a better banking experience, and banks should not shy away from it but accept change, McGrath said.

The digital world "may be daunting but there is no doubt it provides us with the opportunity to provide customers with more choices and an even better banking experience," she said.

"The banking industry needs to respond; otherwise new entrants will snap up the opportunity. And once lost, that ground is very hard to make up as we have seen from other sectors."

McGrath challenged the view that new entrants to the industry won't threaten the traditional banks.

"Customers will essentially choose whom they engage with for their banking needs based on a complex array of needs and perceptions - whether they choose to bank with non-traditional players is entirely up to them," she said.

However, she also pointed to Deloitte's 2014 Mobile Consumer Survey, in which 73 per cent of respondents said that the institution they trusted to facilitate mobile payments was their bank.

"Mobile banking is also not slowing down," McGrath said.  "Over half of our digitally active customers are using mobile banking and doing more than $50 billion worth of transactions a year.

"When we decided to revamp our existing online banking platform we could have just given it a fancy makeover. Instead we looked at everything from the beginning.

"How people use smartphones and tablets, for example, and for the tablet in particular opted for a whole new approach utilising 'drag and drop' to make payments and transfers so much easier and simpler. … The result is Westpac Live."

The bank is also investing in its physical network. Over the past two years it has invested more than $100 million in 79 new style 'Bank Now' branches and it plans to transform a third of the 680-strong Westpac network across Australia by 2017.

"Our Bank Now branches are smaller but more efficient. And as well as changing shape, they are changing location as we look to locate them where our customers go to meet a range of needs," McGrath said.

"In some cases that means out of shopping centres so that we can make the most of our 24/7 automated services that are so important to the Australian night-time economy.

"It means being in new areas of population growth. It means supporting rural and regional Australia with "regional hubs" where customers can experience a 'one stop shop' of a Bank Now branch, business banking centre, specialist mobile bankers and the latest high-speed and high-definition video-conferencing."


McGrath said: "To date, we have invested $23 million in creating this platform across rural and regional Australia and I'm pleased to announce today that we plan to invest another $40 million over the next two years to make sure our customers in these areas across Australia have access to the best possible expertise."


She said that by the end of this year, 148 rural and regional branches of Westpac would be Connect Now enabled.