Australia
ANZ Bank is a publicly listed company that provides banking and financial products and services to over 8.5 million retail and business customers across 32 markets. The bank is committed to sustainability and corporate responsibility. In recent years, ANZ Bank has focused on digital innovation and improving the customer experience through the development of new technologies and services. The bank has also been involved in several community initiatives and partnerships, including programs to support small businesses and improve financial literacy.
Evolving regulations in Australia’s banking landscape
In Australia, the banking regulatory landscape has become more stringent since 2017. Since the Banking Royal Commission, banks have been held to account and are now subject to stronger laws. For instance, banks needed to pay fines or refund money to customers for instances of non-compliance. Under these new regulations, banks were required by law to design their products with their customers’ needs in mind. To build customer relationships, Australian banks had to ensure compliance to safeguard customer data and maintain trust.
ANZ Bank wanted to act responsibly when mistakes were made, putting things right for customers by remediating fairly and efficiently in ways that build customer trust. The bank planned to harness the power of data to identify instances of non-compliance, such as wrong interest rates and fees being charged in the past. However, that meant ANZ Bank teams had to go through every single transaction and balance of the past twenty years, which amounted to approximately 10PB of data.
Deploying a data platform to accelerate compliance
To speed up the process, ANZ Bank decided to use its big data platform, built on Cloudera Private Cloud, for customer remediations and compliance. With the flexibility of Cloudera’s platform, the bank leveraged capabilities, such as data ingestion, customer segmentation, and reporting, to implement various product pipelines for data forensics analysis in the Australia retail and business lending divisions.
Building customer trust—now and in the future
With Cloudera’s open data lakehouse, ANZ Bank could identify past compliance gaps in its processes and products and take action to fix these issues.
ANZ Bank built brand trust by refunding AUD500 million to customers due to regulatory lapses in the past two decades. Cloudera Private Cloud gave ANZ Bank teams the ability to consolidate and analyze large sums of transactions and data over the past 20 years. Teams could sieve through past transactions quickly, allowing the bank to issue refunds to over 3.5 million customer accounts, both past and present, efficiently.
As a result of aggregating and curating 20 years’ worth of transactional data, the platform provided a rich and reliable data product that enabled new use cases for several business-critical banking teams. ANZ Bank also wanted to proactively ensure that discrepancies do not happen in future through a responsible banking initiative. With Cloudera, the bank plans to take its compliance activities forward. ANZ Bank will explore solutions like using Cloudera's machine learning capabilities to build data analytics models to screen its current and new products. These initiatives would be powered by data, supported by 500 ANZ Bank data scientists and machine learning. With these plans, ANZ Bank could ensure that adequate safeguards and best practices were put in place to prevent future lapses in compliance.
