Bendigo and Adelaide Bank looks to Up as digital testbed

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is using its Up neobank partially as a testbed for digital technologies and functions that may have broader applications within the group.

Up was launched in 2018 as a collaboration between Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and fintech company Ferocia.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s chief transformation officer Ryan Brosnahan told FST Media’s Future of Financial Services summit that both Bendigo and Adelaide Bank and Up shared the same digital teams.

“We see [our work with Up] as a huge opportunity to accelerate a lot of what we're doing on our digital agenda at Bendigo,” Brosnahan said.

“The same team that builds Up is the same team that also builds our digital channels so we're getting that real benefit of having the same team learning from things they're doing at Up, learning in terms of what customers actually like and what's working and what's not working, [and] that gives us the ability to rapidly deploy that into our … digital channels as well.”

Brosnahan said Up could function as a kind of digital testbed for Bendigo and Adelaide Bank.

“I think there's an opportunity for piloting and testing a lot of things in Up because of the rapid, short cycle times, and the ability to get that real time feedback in a very digital native customer base,” he said.

“We want to leverage that opportunity more as we go in open banking but [on] lots of other things as well.”

Brosnahan is overseeing Bendigo and Adelaide Bank’s broader transformation, which was a talking point in the bank’s recent FY20 results.

Though some of the bank’s transformation is tied to the need to implement open banking, Brosnahan said Bendigo and Adelaide Bank saw growth opportunities now that the foundations of open banking are in place.

“Open banking is effectively a new channel of engagement with our customers and with our partners,” he said.

“So off the back of this we're embedding new operational capabilities into our organisation to manage and leverage this new channel of engagement. 

“Open banking is at the forefront of enabling us to simplify and modernise the way we do business across the bank.”

Open banking saw Bendigo and Adelaide Bank stand up a cloud infrastructure as well as supporting “governance and assurance frameworks to enable us to run material workloads in the cloud,” Brosnahan said.

“The move to cloud has also driven a renewed and accelerated focus around DevOps. 

“We've also taken the opportunity to build new data capabilities for much broader enterprise benefit, including real time data streaming, API gateways, and a new cloud data platform. 

“We've also implemented a federated identity management solution that will progressively extend to manage the identity and consent process for all of our customer and staff applications. 

“And with the added complexity of multiple core banking systems across our brands, our broader transformation agenda is actively simplifying and modernising the underlying core banking platforms.”

Brosnahan classed Bendigo and Adelaide Bank as a “late adopter in cloud” but claimed that had benefits in being able to learn from the experience of others.