The scene was set back in 2001 when David Liddy joined Bank of Queensland (BoQ) as managing director from a senior position atWestpac. At the time, BoQ was considered a tired ex-government owned regional bank focused on offering a limited range of products to a core customer base in Queensland, the third most populous state in Australia.
Fast-forward to today and BoQ has a branch footprint across all Australian states, is competitive against the big four Australian banks and has completed one of the most intensive IT rejuvenation exercises to support aggressive and ambitious growth targets.
Upon joining BoQ, David Liddy set about reinventing the bank with customer service and personalised banking as the cornerstones. Key to this rejuvenation was the revamping of the bank's existing unwieldy infrastructure into an agile and cost-effective asset to support the business strategy which included plans to dramatically expand branch numbers at a time when other banks were focused on branch closures.
BoQ's core banking system was a 'home grown' Cobol system running on a Fujitsu mainframe. It quickly became obvious that the system would not be able to cope with the demands of aggressive branch expansion (for example, it could not handle bank and branch identification numbers outside Queensland and had limited capacity for customer-based CRMstrategies). However, the bank adopted an holistic view of its infrastructure and undertook a full review of operations.
The outcome was a decision to outsource all IT operations, including responsibility for a total IT upgrade plus the management of back office credit card, loan and mortgage processing, and call centre operations. This meant that bank staff could then concentrate on customer service.
InMarch 2002, BoQ announced a ten-year A$480 million ($483 million) outsourcing agreement with EDS Australia that was projected to save A$100 million over the decade and provide a platform for growth without growing costs.
