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Australia’s Westpac begins rollout of new mobile banking app

By Edil Corneille

September 16, 2020

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Westpac, Australia, bank, big, 4, fourWestpac, earlier this year flagged its new mobile banking app development. This week the bank celebrated the phased rollout, starting with an Apple iOS version to 120,000 digitally active customers before a planned broader launch early next year.

For Chris Bradford, Martin King and their colleagues involved in project “ION”, building Westpac’s new mobile banking app from the ground up has been a long journey that is starting to bear some serious fruit.

At its peak, the team involved around 200 people from GroupTech and the Consumer Bank divisions.

“The project’s been going for two years but we’ve been dreaming of this, thinking and working through it, for even longer, so it’s been a long time in the making,” says Bradford, Westpac’s head of consumer digital technology.

The app marks the bank’s first entirely new app since mobile banking began taking off about a decade ago and was developed with the assistance of tech giants Apple and Google, which assisted with new functionality such as customers making payments without even opening the app via Apple’s intelligent assistant Siri.

Other new features include drag and drop transfers, improved “magic search”, the ability to set up Apple Pay with a single tap and a “card hub”. Customers are able to choose their background wallpaper. They have the option of a fast sign-in when opening the app or can have a “Quick View” of select accounts while pre-signing in.

Building the platform from the ground up with the latest technology means that DevOps can be leveraged more than with the old app, automating things like code deployments, security scans and testing in real time as opposed to the old school approach of conducting deployments every three months or so.

The new app was mostly built inhouse, experimenting with new engineering tech such as LaunchDarkly and Headspin to test features and streamline the project. The team stepped up their use of AppDynamics to get richer and more granular data and insights.

Even before COVID-19, Westpac’s first half results to March 31 showed a further 10 per cent rise in digital transactions and digitally active customers jumped to more than 5 million. Bradford says that in addition to the sizeable increase in usage of Westpac Live (mobile and internet banking) since March, customers have also used more features, often for the first time, such as depositing cheques or accessing proof of account balances via mobile.

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