Westpac New Zealand prepares for real-time payments

Westpac New Zealand (NZ), a retail, corporate and investment bank with more than 1.3 million customers, transformed its retail banking technology and operations to prepare for real-time payments via ACI’s real-time payments solution.

This real-time payments hub supports any-to-any, real-time payments and calls upon a myriad of services — from simple account balance inquiries to fraud checks, payments authorization and settlement.

To facilitate the transformation, ACI worked alongside Westpac NZ through responsive Agile and DevOps practices, enabling the bank to fully capitalize on these flexible and open payment services.

Westpac NZ’s transformation has sped up time to market, enabled innovation and reduced the risk of operating in a real-time world.

The challenge

As one of New Zealand’s largest full-service banks, Westpac NZ needed to be ready for real-time payments and to be able to handle the high expected volume of transactions and operational demands of its clients. Westpac NZ already had a core payment processing platform handled by ACI’s market-leading retail payments solution, so extending this was the obvious solution. 

The solution

Westpac NZ worked with ACI to put in place their real-time payments solution, driven by Agile methodology and DevOps practices, to support real-time payments within their existing environment. As a long-standing ACI customer, Westpac NZ had to replace its existing core payment processing system by leveraging ACI’s real-time solutions. 

By implementing ACI’s real-time payments solution as its financial transaction hub, orchestrating payments across channels, networks and payment types, and settling to any clearing stream in real time, Westpac NZ can now make changes at speed and rapidly scale up operations to overcome market challenges.

The results

Dawie Olivier, GM enterprise transformation services, Westpac NZ, said of the transformation, “Building on our close collaborative relationship with ACI, we partnered with them as we piloted our new Agile/DevOps methodology. While this is not totally new in the banking world, it is perhaps the first time that a bank has replaced a core banking system in this fashion. We saw the payoff of our investment in the technology almost immediately, as we redeployed twice on our go-live day without any impact on performance, while at the same time processing more than $1 billion in transactions.”

About Westpac New Zealand

Westpac NZ has been serving New Zealanders since 1861 and is today one of New Zealand’s largest full-service banks with more than 1.3 million customers. Westpac NZ provides a full range of retail and commercial financial ser