MyState Bank is making further progress on CEO Melos Sulicich's plans to increase digital-only services with a further mobile and internet banking upgrade underway.
The next upgrade has been some time in the making. Over the past 12 months MyState has seen an uptick in demand for its internet and mobile banking, with 71 per cent of customers registered for internet banking and 94 per cent of transactions digitally completed.
Phillip Finnegan, Temenos managing director for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands said the firm’s new Temenos Infinity system would allow retail and SME customers to open a new account in minutes, make instant payments and manage their spending and saving with AI-enabled tools – a capability that CEO Melos Sulicich has consistently alluded to during MyState's full and half year profit announcements since 2018.
MyState says another Temenos client, Virgin Money, is running a very similar system, one that operates across a full banking platform. Temenos origination systems are being run by around 200 banks in Australia, including some of the 10 largest.
Sulicich said: "In evaluating new digital banking platforms, Temenos impressed us with the ... user experience as well as its track-record with other leading banks in Australia. MyState’s growth strategy is to scale-up via a strong digital and AI-enabled offering across the country.”
This tech investment has been a constant refrain, backed by above system loan book growth and more recently a boost in term deposits from areas MyState has no physical presence.
"Digitisation has allowed the bank to provide services across Australia in a way that has not been possible in the past," Sulicich observed in August 2019 after the first major core banking upgrade was locked down.
"Our online customer numbers have doubled in the last 12 months in an environment where we have relatively low market awareness."
In February 2020, after above-system growth in the six months that followed, Sulicich was able to add: "The benefits of process re-engineering and increased use of process automation, including robotics, are beginning to flow, enabling us to serve greater numbers of customers and transactions while reducing average cost."
In MyState's most recent FY21 results announcement in August the company said it had closed six branches during the year, citing a growing customer preference for digital transactions in both its banking and wealth businesses.
Despite its smaller physical footprint, MyState grew its mortgage and deposit books above system. The mortgage book grew 6.8 per cent over the year to A$5.4 billion, which was 1.3 times system growth. Business and personal loan balances both fell, with the result that the total loan book grew 6 per cent to $5.6 billion.
Customer deposits increased by 13 per cent, with the majority of deposit customers acquired via online channels. MyState attracted 17,000 new customers during the year.
The digital improvements have some way to run, so outgoing CEO Sulicich will be leaving their completion to his successor, Brett Morgan, who takes over on 1 December. Morgan is no stranger to running a digital-only bank, with a resume that includes several executive