Bendigo augmenting customer experience with simplification

Summary

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, formed through a 2007 merger and now one of Australia's established regional banking groups, has built its recent strategy around a simple idea: making banking easier by removing unnecessary complexity. The Victoria-headquartered bank is simplifying its operating model, modernising its core banking systems, and forming strategic alliances to diversify revenue beyond traditional lending.

Bendigo's multi-year effort to consolidate core banking platforms, reduce its footprint of technology applications, and accelerate cloud adoption sits at the centre of that push — moves aimed at cutting operational risk while speeding up processes such as home loan approvals and credit decisioning. The bank's partnerships with cloud and technology providers extend into automation that improves system reliability and reduces computing costs.

Bendigo has also ventured into adjacent revenue streams, including a digital home loan platform built with an Australian fintech partner, a real-time bill payment authorisation service, and Up — Australia's first fully digital-only bank, aimed squarely at millennial and Gen Z customers. Branch network strategy, cost-to-serve pressures, and the bank's stance on open banking and buy-now-pay-later round out the picture.

Taken together, these moves point to what it will take for a mid-sized regional bank to keep pace with larger competitors and agile digital-only challengers in an increasingly open financial ecosystem.

• Covers core banking modernisation, cloud migration and branch network transformation
• Profiles Bendigo's digital-only neobank and home loan fintech partnerships
• Examines open banking and buy-now-pay-later as emerging growth levers