Macquarie unveils new digital banking experience

Macquarie today unveiled its new digital banking offering to provide customers with personalised and intuitive features that are firsts in Australian banking. In its development, Macquarie looked to the customer experience delivered by leading digital companies such as Spotify and Facebook, and technology used by organisations like Netflix. 

Head of Personal Banking for Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group, Ben Perham, said: "We had the opportunity to build our digital environment from the ground up, so we looked beyond financial services to digital companies leading in customer experience.

"We set out to provide customers with tools to manage their money that look and feel more like social media sites, search engines and video or music streaming services.

"We see our competition as the last app a customer used. That’s the bar we’ve set ourselves in terms of customer experience.

"The result for our customers is a personalised and intuitive digital banking environment, offering the full range of products including transaction accounts, savings accounts, credit cards and home loans."

Features range from: search-how-you-speak technology; the ability to tag and track transactions; upload receipts and warranties; set saving and spending goals; and automatically categorise spending through machine learning technology.

Mr Perham said: "Delivering intuitive technology to our customers transforms the static information they usually receive into a service that empowers them to achieve their financial goals."

Macquarie’s new transaction and savings accounts also offer everyday benefits that will make a real difference to its customers, including: no monthly fees; no fees at any ATM in Australia (through a refund of fees charged by other organisations); no fees on international purchases; a 50c rebate on cash withdrawals over $100 in store; and stepped interest rates.

Leading this digital transformation is Chief Digital Officer for Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services Group, Luis Uguina.  Mr Uguina joined Macquarie in 2014 from BBVA in Spain, the world’s first global digital bank, and works with a team that includes developers, software and hardware architects, machine learning engineers and mathematicians.

Mr Uguina said Macquarie is seeking input from early users of its digital experience to further enhance and build on its future offering.

"Our approach is highly agile and we’re actively seeking feedback from our customers so we can continue to develop and enhance our offering based on their needs and preferences.

"As well as experiencing everything we’ve delivered already, we’ll be giving early adopters of our products access to our beta environment, so they can test our innovations in their daily lives, tell us what they think and what they want to see next.

"For people who want to bank digitally, we believe our new offering and the approach we’re taking to its future development will be both exciting and empowering," Mr Uguina said.