Julien Eichinger - stock.adobe.c
Australia’s ANZ banks on Google Cloud
The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group has signed up for the Google Cloud Platform to help its bankers deliver data insights to institutional customers
The Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) is working with Google to deliver data-driven business insights to institutional banking customers in Australia.
The move, which follows a proof-of-concept to use the Google Cloud Platform to analyse aggregated, anonymous datasets for customer insights, is expected to enhance ANZ’s data and analytics capabilities.
Joss Raines, head of data and digital for ANZ’s institutional business, said Google’s cloud services has enabled the bank to process data 250 times faster, compared to when it was doing so manually.
“Increasingly, our institutional customers are looking to us for strategic partnership in addition to the financial products and services we offer,” said Raines. “The cloud-based platform can give our bankers meaningful data insights instantly.”
Raines added that over time, the bank will also be able to help customers make informed business decisions more quickly on issues like liquidity, risk and cash management, or strategic calls like store locations, inventory and market positioning.
Google Cloud’s country director for Australia and New Zealand, Colin Timm, said: “Our teams are collaborating to deliver value across the Google Cloud Platform, with focus on where it matters most for customers in analytics, application development capabilities and machine learning to accelerate innovation across the bank.”
The announcement of ANZ as a Google Cloud Platform customer follows recent moves by Google to carve out a bigger slice of the fast-growing Asia-Pacific (APAC) public cloud market.
Read more about cloud computing in Australia
- Organisations in Australia and New Zealand are bullish on IT spending, particularly in cloud infrastructure services and cloud applications, a TechTarget study has found.
- The Digital Transformation Agency has become the first government agency in Australia to test the use of Microsoft Office 365 in a secure cloud.
- The appetite for cloud-based ERP systems is growing in Australia, but some organisations are holding back due to data sovereignty and security concerns.
- Virtualisation juggernaut VMware has rolled out its hybrid cloud service in Australia and has halved the entry price to sweeten the deal for enterprises.
At a recent Google Cloud event, the company’s top executives revealed that Google Cloud had seen “substantial growth” in APAC, driven by demand from both cloud-first startups and traditional enterprises that want to improve customer experiences and become more agile.
“The cloud market is phenomenal, but the adoption rate is still less than 10%,” said Paul-Henri Ferrand, president for global customer operations at Google Cloud. “We’re just at the beginning of the market.”
As a testament to that market potential and without revealing specific growth numbers, Ferrand said Google Cloud had clinched three times the number of deals that exceed $1m on a year-on-year basis.
Across the APAC region, Google already counts the likes of AirAsia, Go-Jek, Mahindra and Mizuho Bank as clients. Besides ramping up its infrastructure investments in the region, it is also part of a consortium that is building a new subsea cable that will improve connectivity between Australia and Southeast Asia.
