Kiwibank’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer Hamish Rumbold says the organisation is on a mission to be customers’ first choice for their banking needs, with technology being a key enabler for change.

The 20-year-old wholly New Zealand-owned bank is undergoing a multi-year transformation, developing a new flexible and adaptive operating platform focused on simple team and customer experiences.

“Success will be achieved by focusing on people, process and technology and breaking complexity down into smaller pieces of work. A bit like owning an old villa, you are renovating and constantly improving all the time. We want to ensure we retain what is great about Kiwibank and honour its history, whilst recognising it will always need work and can always be better,” says Rumbold.

“The approach we are taking is to invest both continuously by improving and renovating 'our house' whilst we live in it and, at the same time, supporting our teams to implement and prove new capabilities on the side so they can go fast, learn, and have the safety to fail forward without impacting our customer and our teams.”

Kiwibank’s integrated technology roadmap, and the build of the new operating platform, is anchored on the organisation’s strategy and delivering customer and business value. 

“We have achieved this through customer and team journey mapping, establishing a target operating model and architecture (the BIAN capability model) and working through process improvements leveraging the APQC framework,” says Rumbold.

In parallel to significant remediation and renovation of its existing stack, in 15 months the team has implemented Kiwibank’s largest ever tech release including: 

•  Eight large applications
•  18 modern services such as account, loan application, and parts
•  23 foundational capabilities
• These all now talk to each other on one modem platform

Much of this technology is world best, says Rumbold. And includes leading cloud native applications such as:

•  nCino, a leading lending SaaS origination system; Thought Machine Vault, a cloud native smart contract-based core banking solution; ACI a leader in real time payments and the first cloud SaaS implementation in the region; and Genesys, a SaaS cloud native call centre software application.
• An event-driven, with domain-oriented microservices, application integration framework built using an everything-as-code and API-first design/development approach. A strongly typed, decoupled system that enables clearly defined integration with high testability. Key technologies include:  Dotnet Core, Kafka, AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, Federated GraphQL, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Postgres, Storybook.
• Data platform: Architecture is based on Snowflake, AWS and various OSS components. Data products/data pipelines are encapsulated, extensible, automated, domain-owned, and underpinned by a growing set of platform capabilities. Change is delivered using opinionated CI/CD and client tooling which reduces cost of entry and enables Governance-as-Code from day one.

To deliver the new operating platform, Rumbold and his team have established cross functional teams (squads) from right across the organisation, supported by modern ways of working. 

“Across these squads we have embedded coaches to continuously develop our people and our culture and improve our flow of work,” he adds.

The impact of these changes to date have demonstrated improved customer and team experiences with a significant reduction in data entry and manual processes. Rumbold also highlights the benefits of using flexible and adaptive technology with an API-first and event driven approach together. 

“It has allowed us to build things in parallel, reducing hard dependencies on other teams and domains enabling us to go a lot faster.”