Westpac modernises its wealth management business
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MINS READ
Industry
- Banking
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Solution
- Cloud
- Consulting
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Highlights
- Westpac, one of four major banking organisations in Australia, wanted to divest its wealth management arm, including its insurance, superannuation and advisory services to better align with its business objectives.
- The company engaged TCS to undertake multiple simplification and transformation programmes.
- TCS helped Westpac consolidate its various registry systems and wealth management products to simplify the divesting process.
In this article
The context
Westpac Banking Corporation wanted to divest parts of its wealth management business, BT Financial Group (BTFG).
The divestiture will help Westpac focus better on core banking operations. The organisation provides a broad range of banking and financial services in Australia and New Zealand, including consumer, business and institutional banking, and wealth management services. As part of its strategy to focus on core banking in these markets, Westpac undertook a simplification programme to exit some of its businesses to better serve its 13.9 million customers across the region.
This included the separation of the BT Financial Group (BTFG) businesses, including general insurance, life insurance, superannuation and advisory services.
Westpac engaged TCS to undertake the following initiatives for simplification and transformation:
- Consolidating and transitioning technology to enable Westpac Group to divest its general and life insurance businesses
- Simplifying the business and migrating the legacy Wrap platform to Nextgen BT Panorama to scale and deliver stronger performance
- Consolidating data centres to one location, Sydney, for better efficiency
TCS’ intervention
TCS worked with BT Financial Group to build a multi-year roadmap for transformation.
TCS executed some parts of the project by adopting an outcome-based model, taking major ownership of the transformation journey. The programme entailed the following:
Technology simplification: Leveraging its expertise, TCS helped in shifting its complex legacy architecture to a microservices-based environment to build an efficient system. A little over 150,000 accounts with a total of $56.6 billion in funds under administration (FUA) were migrated from legacy platforms such as BT Wrap to BT Panorama. The latter is an integrated and intuitive platform that offers clients access to a wide range of investment opportunities.
Sale of the general insurance business: TCS off-loaded about 150 templates of the Westpac General Insurance Limited (WGIL) business. Westpac’s life insurance business is also undergoing a separation process.
Technology modernisation: To help BTFG build a future-ready platform, TCS consolidated multiple legacy databases and applications previously hosted in different locations in the country. The databases and applications were moved to the Westpac technology data centre in Sydney, thereby enabling the group to provide better customer experiences.
Service transformation: TCS is working with BTFG to enhance the self-service option for its wealth management platform users and ensure future scalability and growth by moving to the cloud.
Business benefits
The simplification of BTFG’s products, processes and operational sites resulted in direct cost benefits.
Westpac realised huge gains across areas:
- Fund under administration (FUA) rose to $AUD 100 billion after migration
- 50% increase in digital adoption
- 20% increase in in inflow of investors and advisers
- Lower compliance and maintenance costs
- Cost savings on technology and administration
- Increased straight-through processing and reduced cost to serve
The TCS advantage
TCS collaborated with BTFG to create a cloud-enabled, future-ready enterprise.
The programme brought down the cost of operations and led to the creation of a scalable wealth platform. TCS was able to realise this and other key milestones by working closely with all stakeholders. Most of the programmes were executed in an outcome-based model, with TCS having major ownership of the project.
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