ANZ’s tragic teller system

First you dub an application as “Platinum” – critical to your business. That’s a good idea, so you now know you need to get the system and support absolutely right.

You choose to run a trial before rolling it out to all branches – another good idea.

However that’s where things started going wrong for ANZ.

You chose also to run it on Windows, which not exactly secure nor stable in a banking sense, and attracts licensing payments for each installation. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing if done right.

However it seems that it takes 30 to 45 people to support the application at the 20 pilot branches – which implies that it really doesn’t sound like you are “providing tools to make banking easier” for your branch staff.

You next announce to staff that you will outsource support for this application to India, which means the 30-45 people that are currently supporting the trial are going to be out of a job or very nervous about being so. Their personal inclination to professionally support the pilot will be challenged as concern about job stability preys on their minds. This does not bode well for the roll-out.

Finally it all gets leaked to the media, and as a kicker it appears that the Reserve bank may need to approve outsourcing these jobs supporting a core system. Meanwhile an Australian bank gettting rid of New Zealand jobs will not play well in the media or with customers contemplating the (currently) better mortgage rates over at Kiwibank.

The application is MyTell, the new teller application for ANZ and National Bank. It is, I guess, only used when tellers and back office staff are actually in banks, which is during normal working hours, and the jobs to be lost are in Wellington.

From the short article my guess is that ANZ was overwhelmed with the budget required for the amount of support demanded by this application, and are seeking to do everything they can to reduce costs.

I would humbly submit that either fixing the system so that it needs essentially nobody to help, or abandoning it and trying again are the more viable medium and long term options.

This is of course my analysis from a scant 7 sentence article – not doubt there are nuances large and small.

However I’m guessing that this saga will bring a smile to the faces of the folk at Kiwibank.