W H O’ S W H O Q& A // RUSSE L L JON ES
payments now being made available on smart devices. Defending payments in the mobile landscape will require eftpos and bank credit card functionality to be available on mobile smart devices and easily integrated into mobile banking applications. The industrywide ‘NZ wallet’ approach is a positive step in this direction.
FST MEDIA: What is the ‘holy grail’ that technology and innovation are yet to deliver in financial services?
JONES: ASB is well known for its great customer engagement and long term technology leadership, so a ’holy grail’ for us would be the achievement of genuine flexibility and tailoring of the customer experience at scale. While we can do this individually in certain systems, we aim to be able to treat every customer as a true ‘segment of one’, in the channel of their choice, at any time they choose.
FST MEDIA: What are the next steps for ASB to strengthen its real-time banking offering for customers?
JONES: Our proven real-time capability
Russell Jones NEW ZEALAND
EXECUTIVE GENERAL MANAGER, TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION, ASB BANK
92
W HO ’S WHO OF FS I
FST MEDIA: How can banks fight the threat of disintermediation in the payments landscape?
JONES: As we are seeing in the US, potential disruption with mobile payments (e.g. Apple Pay, Square and Google) will eventually replace traditional plastic card-based payments in both physical and remote situations. In New Zealand, we have one of the world’s leading domestic payments environments, with Kiwis enjoying seamless payments at POS eftpos with resulting cash usage rates being the lowest in the OECD. However, eftpos and credit card payments are primarily based on older magstripe and chip technologies, and these are being rapidly outmoded by the faster, more convenient ‘contactless’ tap-and-go
positions us extremely well as customer expectations are now that this a basic hygiene factor. Our customers are already benefiting from the integration of our banking systems, with real-time accounting systems like Xero and MYOB, and we have aggressive plans to add further functionality and data access. The API capability we launched last year enables us to securely expose more functionality at an increased pace, enabling real-time banking to power the digital economy.
FST MEDIA: What are your IT priorities for the next 12 to 18 months?
JONES: We have our base workload of the refreshing of our infrastructure, and upgrades to applications, coupled with a number of specific initiatives to support our strategic objectives. Within the technology function, we are continuing to leverage Agile and dev-ops to improve overall throughput and delivery speed.