Australian Bank Improves Business Processes and Customer Experience with Mobile

Several companies demonstrated how adopting Microsoft’s mobile solutions has improved their businesses at the Microsoft Business Mobility Event last week.

Australian bank Westpac was one of the companies that talked about the benefits they’ve seen from Microsoft’s enterprise mobility. Westpac, the second largest bank in Australia, has leveraged Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 for Discover Your World, a mobile program for its wealth advisers. The program allows advisers and clients to interact with the intuitive and rather colorful tablet app to manage financial decisions, said Michael Chesworth, general manager of Financial Planning at Westpac.

Microsoft has focused its efforts in enterprise mobility on integrating data across different devices and apps, which allows the Wesptac program to be convertible to any device. Westpac customers sign documents on the spot with their adviser and can take elements of the app home to interact with their plan between adviser meetings, Chesworth added.

Managers and sales teams can also take their next steps without tedious processing of paperwork. Chesworth says Westpac is transforming face-to-face interactions, increasing productivity and speed of process with the program.

[Read: Bank of America Wins Javelin’s Best in Class Mobile Banking Award for more on mobile strategies]

Microsoft has been investing in making mobile phones better for business. To that end, the recent announcement of the Enterprise feature pack extended the support lifecycle of phones from 18 months to 32 "to show commitment of investment… and to make it the best phone for business customers."

The tech giant is also pushing for increased application integration, supporting as much commonality as possible between Windows and Windows phones. About 60% of the source code can be shared today. Microsoft is actively optimizing this to make it easier for developers to build apps that run across all devices.

Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio