Beyond Bank CIO: Balancing tradition and innovation in the digital age

Beyond Bank Australia is one of the largest customer-owned banks in Australia and one of the leading B Corps in the country. That certification measures your company’s social and environmental impact, both of which we’re super proud of, but it’s also deeply rooted in our culture. Beyond Bank has a real focus on customers who are the members and owners of the bank. All the money that’s made goes back into the bank, which is a different slant compared to say, the big banks or large corporates that have shareholders they have to pay dividends to. 

We particularly focused on communities and, last year, we partnered with more than 5,000 community organizations around Australia. We work with them on some of Australia’s most pressing issues, from housing affordability to helping all Australians have stronger levels of financial well-being. We’re a very relationship-led bank. 

As the CIO of Beyond Bank, I’m accountable for all aspects of technology, across the business: banking, tech and data and business intelligence. Everything from ‘my computer won’t turn on’ and ‘can you fix this’ type workplace and service desk, to engineering, the building and running systems that power the bank, the branch tech, ATMs, tellers, call centers, the infrastructure and architecture, cyber incident management and the NOC. Basically, the whole lot. It’s a really big, broad role, which I love. 

A big part of my tech role is to ensure we’re always thinking about how technology can be used to empower the frontline to have better and more meaningful interactions with our customers. This ranges from getting the data right to thinking about ways to use both proven and nascent tech to bring forward insights in real time to our frontline so they can do their jobs more easily. Branch tech is important because, going against the trend, we’re more likely to open branches than close them. 

The biggest challenges facing CIOs in the banking sector 

The role of CIOs has transformed quite a lot over the years, extending beyond traditional tech responsibilities, especially in banking. If you think about what is fundamentally powering a bank, it’s people and technology. So, the responsibilities are both broad and deep. And it sometimes means being the jack of all trades at the CIO level because you’re the executive facing the board, keeping up with multiple board expectations – as well as the expectations of other executives, your team and other stakeholders – but being able to discuss not only the depth of technology, but the breadth of business and how tech helps to power the business. 

There’s also broader stuff, such as economic uncertainty. That plays out in the interesting choices about where you invest in technology, the short-term and long-term trade-offs, hybrid workplaces, global workplaces, mobility and how to get the tech right. It also involves nascent technologies like AI, genAI, IoT and quantum…and figuring out how to safely incorporate that into your operations is important. If you think about the expectations of the board and the excitement around some of this really nascent technology, as a technologist you understand the deeper risks and the controls you need to put in place. It’s a bit of a balancing act. Talent acquisition and retention are always a big issue, of course. And, predominantly for CIOs and CISOs, you always have to consider the evolving cybersecurity landscape and the threats that are associated with that. 

Our digital transformation journey 

Digital and digitization are both high priorities for Beyond Bank. In terms of digital, I’m proud of the team and our digital capabilities. For instance, our app is super sleek for such a small bank, relative to the market. It’s won several awards. Canstar in particular is one that we’ve won multiple times…every time in digital since 2015, in the customer and banking sector. It’s something the team and I are very proud of and focused on continuing to maintain. 

We’re not trying to replace human-to-human banking because that’s part of our core values. But in terms of digital, it’s about enhancing the experience and providing our customers with convenience, the convenience of banking mobility and the ability to drive value and financial well-being through real-time insights. 

Advice is something we’re really interested in. I have a very strong belief that you don’t make digital awesome by just pumping a ton of features into your asset. Instead, really using data to qualify and quantify and getting out there and listening to your customers about what they’re experiencing, what they’re using – the pain, the gains, the jobs to be done…all of that. And focusing your investment quite specifically on this type of thing and continuing to measure and pivot what you do around this data. Intently investing in making that experience awesome. 

The other thing the team worked hard on was the new website, which launched in late June 2024. We had a lot of fun thinking about interesting ways to use tech to drive personalized experiences. 

We’re focused heavily on digitization from an efficiency and productivity perspective because it really does influence cost-to-income. The more cost-effective we are, the more we can put back into the business and do for our customers and communities. This effort includes the traditional stuff like RPA and automation, but also thinking about ways to leverage generative AI for efficiencies, enhancing customer experience and using it to prevent frauds and scams and all of that. 

Keeping tech on track: A strategic approach 

I’ve been in the role for less than a year, so I’m still playing the new girl card. I’m still in the listening phase. But as those who know me know, I am extremely action-orientated. I’m formulating a new technology strategy that is deeply connected to the business strategy. And it’s great timing because we spent the first part of 2024 as an executive team formulating the new business strategy, which we then launched to the broader organization. 

Our purpose doesn’t change in this new strategy: We exist to change the lives of our customers and communities, through financial well-being. We’re focused on being Australia’s best relationship bank. And technology plays such a big role in that. As I mentioned before, it’s about using tech to give our customers and communities greater access to banking services, insights into their financial state and advice on their financial well-being. Using tech to enhance our frontline capabilities, so the people in our call centers can spend more time focusing on the customer and less time battling with the friction of clunky systems or having to traverse multiple systems to do their jobs. Proactively bringing forward insights based on the data we have about our customers so our frontline can have richer conversations with their customers. It’s also important to use tech to gain efficiencies and better run our operation. 

I’m a get-the-fundamentals-right tech leader, so I take it down to this basic concept: We’re a bank, and we have customers, and customers give us their money to look after. So, there are really two fundamental things customers expect from us at the core and that’s: ‘Keep my money safe’ and ‘Give it to me when I want it.’ Security and availability. When it comes to driving a tech strategy, those two things are front and center. 

The role of new and emerging technologies 

The combination of new and existing tech creates the biggest potential. Everyone’s excited by genAI and so am I, but it’s not new. It’s been around for a long time, let’s call it 2018, when OpenAI developed GPT. It’s very easy to get carried away with these things. 

I’m particularly excited by our greater ability to analyze data, find patterns, generate insights, make predictions and automate tasks at pace and at scale. I’m excited about how we use this to personalize the experience for customers, to optimize productivity and enable speed to market. I’m passionate about how we can use new tech to foster greater inclusivity. For example, how emerging tech can help people living with disabilities to participate more fully in society, and link that to financial well-being, which is super cool and the augmentation of human capability for good, which is something I love. 

Quantum computing is something I find fascinating personally. A while ago I was at Sydney Uni alumni dinner, and I was chatting to one of the guys from IBM about building encryption capability to withstand the assault of a future quantum computer. The risks around tech decoding today’s cybersecurity measures as it becomes more accessible to the masses. I find that really interesting. 

Like everyone, Beyond Bank is cautiously optimistic about implementing new and emerging tech and is working out how to safely experiment in a controlled way. We have to consider the nature of our policies and frameworks to ensure the ethical use of these technologies, privacy, and the safety of customers and organizational data while reaping the benefits of emerging tech. 

Legacy tech and emerging tech: A balancing act 

It’s easy to get carried away by the hype of cutting-edge technology. For me, it’s about making sure that you always ask yourself if you’re solving an actual business problem. That has to be front of mind, as opposed to being solution- or tech-first. You also have to ask yourself if the business problem requires nascent or proven tech? Once you figure that out, the tech side answer is relatively straightforward. So, even with leveraging emerging tech, you need to think congruently about your business model. 

There’s a real focus at the moment on getting efficiencies out of automation and artificial intelligence. But like it or lump it, these efficiencies mean we replace what a human does with technology. That means your business model needs to either support reducing the number of humans you have, or you need a balance sheet that can support giving those humans something else to do. And that isn’t financially viable for every business. But when you increase the technology budget in your expense line, and you don’t take down the people line, then you just have a higher overall cost line. And in this economic climate, where there’s so much focus on cost to income, you need to think about the broader implications of your investments and what that does to your business and your people, and how that aligns with your business model and your culture. It’s something that should be front of mind when we talk about implementing new tech or leveraging old tech. 

As I said before, I’m a real get-the-fundamentals-right person. So, we are highly skewed in our tech investments around security and ensuring the availability of our critical systems, which I tell my team all the time isn’t always the most exciting stuff. But it is the most important. 

Security first, and the importance of partnerships 

Security is the first thing I looked at. Even in my interview, I said it would be the first thing I looked at, and it has been. Security and privacy are the basic foundations of trust, and customer and community trust is what our business is built on. So, my approach is to spend money to bring in deep expertise, which I have, and empower them to go deep into our current state and be honest about any gaps we might have. And to think about where we implement both tactical and strategic ways to bridge those gaps. 

It’s also important to be clear about the risk we hold and how long we want to hold it for and focus on building a response plan. So, if and when an incident occurs, we can recover and respond gracefully and have solid comms plans and playbooks in place. People know what they need to do in crisis mode, and they can’t necessarily think laterally. 

I’m a massive fan of things like red teaming exercise drills and game days, because, like any skill you learn, you have to put in the reps to get the games. In terms of designing new solutions, I think it’s critical that we embed controls to ensure that things are secure by design right up front. So, there are both preventative and detective ways of enhancing the cyber environment. 

It’s the essence of partnership in the truest sense of the word. I’m looking for an actual partnership with my tech partners: actual, proven experience in the thing you’re asking them to help you with because you’re usually partnering with someone because you either don’t have the skills internally or can’t afford to hire them. So deep expertise is important. And since I’m action-orientated, having a partner that’s also action-orientated is important. You also need someone to talk to when stuff goes wrong. Because of that action orientation, it’s critical that you can pick up the phone or talk to someone directly in the face of a crisis or any issues that you’re experiencing. 

I love partners who proactively give me insight into what’s going on in the market, what I should be thinking about and what’s next. And someone who proactively supports us to optimize what we’ve got, to make sure we’re using what we have as effectively as we can and not just selling us the next best thing.