ANZ Bank head of digital and transformation Liz Maguire.
ANZ Bank head of digital and transformation Liz Maguire says banking is all about people.
"It's about the big financial decisions people need to make. They want reassurance and they want to share their goals. More than anything they want to talk to a banker."
It's a philosophy she carries into her role overseeing the bank's digital offering and how it uses technology to prepare for future challenges.
She says every ANZ technology project starts by taking people into account.
In 2017, that also means putting mobile at the centre of the customer's banking experience.
"Our strategy is that it should be possible to do all the little bits and pieces of banking through your mobile. Almost anything you might want to do can be done with GoMoney, our mobile banking app. That's easy to say, but there's a lot of work needed behind the scenes to make that happen," she says.
The nature of the work needed to make banking systems has changed over the years. In the past banks worked on complex projects that could take years to come to fruition.
Today Maguire says the ANZ is an agile shop, it's been that way for at least the past five years. "We use agile development processes. These are all about short cycles to get to working software.
"You get an opportunity to test with users, either customers or bank staff along the way. This approach reduces risk. With big projects, there was always a lot of risk — a chance a project would go late or deliver something different from what users wanted."
Making ANZ's agile development customer-focused is important. Maguire says having frequent user interaction while you are building is rewarding for developers.
More to the point, it means that the products being developed meet user needs and expectations from the outset.
Part of the thinking behind agile development is that nothing is set in stone. The bank continues to refine its development processes.
"We're doing a lot of work making sure our products and services are more organised around customer needs rather than our channels."
Maguire says the starting point for any development work is to look for areas where customers are dissatisfied.
This means understanding their pain points and listening to what they ask for.
"It's refreshing to have customers go to the trouble of taking part. At any moment, we have a top-10 list of things we should be working on. We constantly review that to make sure what's on our technology road map fits with customer demand," she says.
One of the projects the bank is working on is adding international money transfers to the mobile app. Maguire says it is a complex transaction.
"It's been a challenge to enable this and make it easy for customers, but it's one of the things they've been asking for."
Not all the work is for ANZ's customers. Maguire is also responsible for building the tools to help bankers. She says the process is similar, but the end goal is to help employees make life easier for customers.
The focus is to join up the customer and banker experience.
Though the applications and functions available to bankers are different to those seen by customers, she says the apps often look and work the same way.
So, if a customer asks a bank manager to perform a transaction search, it looks the same on the bank screen as on the customer's computer.
For now, ANZ development cycles means products like internet banking and the GoMoney app are refreshed about once a month.
Maguire would like that to be quicker — she says Facebook releases code many times a day. Though customers wouldn't want to be forced to update apps too often, web banking can move faster.
"We ask ourselves how we can speed up the cadence."
Maguire says voice technology looks set to be a big deal for ANZ. She points out humans have been talking a lot longer than using devices.
"Voice will be an interesting way to address digital uptake in older customers.
"Plenty of older customers use GoMoney, but some don't. Voice will let people ask for transactions instead of figuring out what buttons to press. Our team has already built Siri (Apple speech technology) integration into GoMoney."
Customers can also use Apple's new face recognition feature on the iPhone X to sign-in to GoMoney.
Though the technology is new, Maguire says the ANZ approach is not about being first with emerging developments, but delivering technologies customers want.
That worked for the bank when it was first to market Apple Pay in New Zealand by a year.
She says the bank was extremely pleased with what that move did for customer acquisition.