The Client: ANZ
ANZ is one of the top four banks in Australia, the largest banking group in New Zealand and the Pacific region, and among the top 50 banks in the world.
Headquartered in Melbourne, ANZ employs more than 45,000 people across its global operations in thirty-four countries. The bank’s proud heritage goes back to the mid 19th century, and its leadership is keenly aware that success can continue only if the organization stays attuned to customer needs.
The rapidly growing fintech industry is changing people’s perceptions of how banking is done. Today’s financial consumers have many options when choosing where to bank, invest or borrow capital, and ways to manage their money. Established banks such as ANZ realize that business-as-usual no longer works and that a new strategy is needed to compete effectively—a strategy that puts a discerning and tech-savvy customer at its center.
Regionally, ANZ is on the forefront of digital banking. It was the first major bank in Australia to offer customers Apple Pay and Android Pay, as well as a mobile-payments app. However, ANZ didn’t want to stop at digital-banking products popular today, but rather educate its leaders on how to continue to anticipate—and shape—what customers will want and need in the future. “Our primary impetus was a need for digital transformation and opportunities it could provide for ANZ,” says Bruce Ahearne, Program Manager Digital Banking. “How can ANZ respond to consumer demand for digital transformation and be a leader in the space? We needed to invest in our senior people’s digital mindset, not only in technology.”
ANZ tapped MIT Sloan to provide the type of educational engagement required to power this fundamental institutional mind shift. ANZ has been a long-time partner of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), which offers digital leaders insights on topics such as business complexity, data monetization, and the digital workplace. That relationship has led the bank to MIT Sloan Executive Education. “We knew about other business schools, of course, but CISR’s thinking and research made the choice easy for us,” says Alistair Currie, then Chief Operating Officer of ANZ, and one of the original champions of the program. “MIT’s reputation in technology applied to business, creation of value in that area, and Sloan being a first-class management institution—we got the best of both worlds.”
Together with MIT Sloan Executive Education program designers and senior MIT faculty—including CISR Chairman and Senior Research Scientist Dr. Peter Weill and Research Director and Principal Scientist Dr. Jeanne Ross—ANZ developed an educational program focused on digital transformation. “Digitisation and Industrialisation: Unlocking the Potential of Digitisation” was designed in stages, starting with a session delivered to the ANZ board of directors and followed by a condensed pilot for an expanded group of the bank’s most senior leaders. Based on the feedback collected in these sessions, a weeklong program was rolled out for 170 senior executives across the organization. “ANZ senior executives wanted to understand the bank of the future and how to get there,” says Dr. Weill, Faculty Director of the program. “As an Aussie myself, I thought a great way to do that was to bring them to MIT to experience the best we have to offer—and give the senior leaders a common set of frameworks, examples and language for the future.”
Typical of all MIT Sloan executive education engagements, action learning is an integral part of the experience, and with this group, it has to be done in-class and not between sessions back in the home office. “ANZ was keen to have the action learning challenges rolled into the week at MIT,” says Meg Regan, Program Director at MIT Sloan Executive Education. “We found a way for the action learning to be completely embedded within the residential portion of the program, and designed the week to include a project challenge that allowed them to take a real ANZ business challenge, work in a multidisciplinary team, and apply the frameworks to cement the learning. It makes for an intense week, but the executives are so committed to this that they really put the time and energy into it and truly experience drinking from the MIT firehose.”
That time and energy has already produced results for ANZ. “Everyone is inspired, energized. We now have a common language, common mindset,” says Ahearne. “We have a cohesion that wasn’t there before—through frameworks, ideas, experience. We have created a new network of senior leaders, and our HR Director is working on creating a virtual community of alumni of this program.”
“We now have a plan of attack to tackle our digital transformation very structurally and more systemically. This gives us a much better shot at actually making the transition to becoming a 21st-century company and being around for another 180 years.”
“Now when I talk to leaders of business units, they are very much aligned and give priority to digital, and I think it’s given us a common purpose and an alignment that makes sense,” says Chaminda Ranasinghe, Head of Digital Sales & Marketing at ANZ and a program participant in one of early cohorts. “Part of the long-term impact of this program will be that our organization will be not just a more digital organization, but we will be a more modern, successful organization. I think we will be far better equipped to compete in the world that we are currently in than we’ve ever been before.”
Christine Linden, ANZ General Manager, Regional Business Banking saw the value this program brings to her job after only a couple days on campus, “Since I’ve been here, something has come up back home and I’ve actually written back saying, ‘We might need to look at it a different way.’ So I am already starting to think about what’s my role in this, what do I need to do differently and I’ve seen that in colleagues.”
For participants, being on the MIT campus, and away from the day-to-day demands of their jobs, was a key aspect of the program’s success. Darren Abbruzzese, then General Manager for Data at ANZ was among the very first cohort and remembers MIT campus as “one of the best parts of the whole experience.” “I could spend the whole week without distractions and really focus on learning,” he recalls. “Being on MIT campus, you can feel the passion for innovation, both by MIT and the surrounding area. Innovation happens here.”
Access to senior MIT faculty from across the institute makes the program a distinctly MIT experience. “Faculty is what makes this program unique to MIT,” says Dr. Ross. “Our research focuses on digital transformation. We totally get it. We get immersed in that world.”
Another instructor is Steve Spear, who holds appointments both at the MIT School of Engineering and at Sloan. Spear’s lectures offered a direct connection between academic principles and applying them to industry, and also caused some excitement among the participants who have been following Spear’s publications for years. “I can see Steve Spear in front of me. How can I ever dream that?” enthused Pankajam Sridevi, Managing Director of ANZ’s Bengaluru Hub. “When I read his book ‘High Velocity Edge,’ it’s become a Bible for me.”
And the feeling of appreciation is mutual. “I’ve been really impressed by the commitment of the faculty,” says Maile Carnegie, Group Executive Digital Banking at ANZ. “Their commitment for wanting to see the work stick and have impact and help with the internal education of the CEO and the Executive Team. I had a real sense that Peter [Weill] and the team really want ANZ to be successful, that it’s really not a—pun intended—just an academic exercise for them, that they feel invested in wanting this to be a success.”
MIT faculty and program designers constantly evaluate participants’ feedback and adjust the program accordingly. One cohort requested the action-learning portion of the program to be changed from a competition among small teams to a project that could involve the entire group—and MIT redesigned the exercise immediately to accommodate the group’s desire for a wider collaboration.
ANZ’s strong relationship with MIT started with CISR over a decade ago and now expands far beyond Sloan. ANZ is involved with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO)—an interdisciplinary dual-degree program between Sloan and MIT School of Engineering. “Our best executive education engagements either build upon or create strong relationships across the institution,” says Regan, Program Director.