Westpac has successfully liberated over a million hours of staff time and achieved 300 automations by adopting a low-code approach, whilst also its "citizen developers" to self-serve and meet challenges head-on.
The bank’s use of a low-code platform allows both non-technical and IT staff to build solutions or develop applications through a drag-and-drop approach using prebuilt components over traditional methods of developing code from scratch.
The approach enables the bank to be more efficient, in part by allowing non-technical users to develop solutions themselves.
Head of robotics and intelligent automation, Abhi Kadian told a Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies conference these automations play “a key role in creating simple and efficient end-to-end experiences for our people and our customers”.
“We’ve freed up more than 1 million hours of our people's time... through more than 300 automations in digitisation that have been delivered," Kadian said.
Westpac has also digitised over 400 customer and banker service requests, “simplified lots of forms”, and “delivered more than 30 implementations of process mining just in the last 18 months alone”.
Westpac Power Platform centre of excellence (CoE) lead, Mithun Parameswaran said due to the skill shortage the bank has a “strategy in place to upskill our own workforce” in low-code technologies.
"We upskill our own workforce to be able to create our own internal capability, along with working with partners and vendors as well, that do have specialised, expertise in these capabilities," he said.
Parameswaran said the bank isn’t “just leveraging one technology” to build low-code solutions, but taking a “broad-based approach” dependent on business needs when onboarding tools.
“The approach we've taken is very much been using the best-of-breed type of technologies in low-code, whether it be robotics, whether it be workflow, whether it be application development, or document digitisation as well with [optical character recognition] technologies," he said,
“What that enables for us, is it opens up more and more opportunities in terms of the types of processes that we can actually automate within the organisation.”
Coordinating between its different technology platforms led Westpac to set up its own centre of excellence (CoE) under a “centralised model” to “develop our own internal capability and expertise on these technologies”.
“As we mature in each of these capabilities, whether it be robotics or low-code, workflow, or application development, once we reach a level of maturity, we can actually then look at how we scale that more broadly in the organisation to actually federate delivery and support," Parameswaran said.
Its “citizen developers” can also access these capabilities within “guardrails” set in place.
Westpac’s low-code transformation provides greater ability for non-technical people to develop their own applications which in turn creates visibility into issues facing various teams.
“If you were to go and build your own application today, we would be able to actually see that you are building an application, how many people that you're sharing with, what type of data that you might be connecting to," Parameswaran said.
“What that then really enforces or allows us to do, is reach out to people proactively, and understand a bit more about what kind of business problems that they're facing, why they are actually building solutions in the first place”.
Parameswaran said users have limited customer data access and are made aware of policies or rules to follow as part of governance measures.
He said the bank has a "quite well-defined" user developer application policy that ensures staff can only access permitted systems and tools.
