ANZ Banking Group tackles risk reporting 'rethink' on Google cloud

ANZ Banking Group is rethinking its financial risk and regulatory reporting processes “end-to-end”, running them off a Google cloud-based platform.

The bank flagged regulatory compliance as a potential Google Cloud use case back in mid-2019, and revealed at the Google Cloud Next ‘21 conference last week that it has made progress in the area.

“We are rethinking our [financial risk and regulatory reporting] process end-to-end,” ANZ’s CIO for corporate services and global payments Peter Reynolds said.

“The reason is ever-increasing cyber and fraud threats, and a tsunami of regulation. 

“We can’t just keep on adding people with our different data silos and highly manual processes. 

“We need to be much more fluent in technology, ML and AI, data and cloud, and algorithms, and the human communication skills that go along with that.”

Reynolds said the bank’s approach to the transformation of its risk functions is “to drive a consistent set of services across our divisions, common reporting and modelling, fewer shared platforms, with a consistent set of high quality data that’s all cloud-based.”

“It’s not just about moving what we have to cloud,” he said.

“It’s about harnessing the power of cloud and new tools such as BigQuery and Looker [for business intelligence] to do things differently, and that’s going to deliver this horizontal platform to deliver our data quicker, cheaper and more automated, where we have really the lowest grain data available, inbuilt data lineage, well defined metadata and data dictionaries.”

Reynolds said one risk-based use case that the platform is being used for is “home loan delinquency” - people that fall behind on their mortgage repayments.

“It’s just one use case but it’s where the data spans our business and regulatory reporting,” he said.

“Home loan delinquency is important because it not only lets us manage our capital position but it also lets us engage early with customers who may be in hardship and we can reach out to them and help them. 

“So the use case is a good choice - it has lots of touchpoints but it’s simple enough, even though it spans multiple customer segments, channels and business units.”

Broadly, Reynolds said ANZ had looked to Google for advice and guidance on being able to run its “common data platform” natively on Google Cloud Platform, and to be able to operate as much as possible via code - both infrastructure-as-code, and data-as-code.

“Traditionally we’d think about data as a set of tables, columns and rows, [and as] physical storage, and now we’re thinking much more of our data-as-code and the end-to-end logic,” Reynolds said.

“Some of the concepts that have been brought together [that] we’re embedding now into the way we do regulatory reporting are, for example, our data modelling and leveraging [Google’s financial] industry data model.”

He added that there was a focus on making data more self-serve, with improved ability to buld data reports and dashboards”.