Westpac CRM project extends to NZ

The New Zealand arm of Westpac will have input into a $A200 million CRM and analytics upgrade being carried out by its Australian parent.

Project Reach, which kicked off in September, involves extending CRM software from Siebel to all staff, a data warehouse from Teradata and additional data mining capability from SAS, with the ultimate goal of creating a single view of customer data.

However, differences in the size and age of the New Zealand and Australian markets and between the local arm and Westpac's legacy banking systems mean there's a lot of work to be done on integration, says New Zealand process management general manager Phil Doak.

"We each have our own legacy systems and information components that sit within them; it's a matter of understanding the migration path we'll head down."

The core customer information systems in New Zealand and Australia are also different, Doak says.

Doak says how and when Siebel will be deployed here is yet to be decided, "because we need to understand what the best means of deploying it is; we need to understand how an application like Siebel would benefit us and how we could leverage it".