BREAKING: Westpac unveils new I&O director

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Jason Millett has been announced as Westpac’s Director of Infrastructure and Operations, according to an internal memo seen by FST Media.

Jason Millett has been announced as Westpac’s Director of Infrastructure and Operations, according to an internal memo seen by FST Media.

Joining the Sydney team, Millett will report to Richard Holmes, Westpac General Manager, Infrastructure and Operations, and commences his new role this week.

“It is great to welcome [Jason] back and I look forward to working with him in his new role, which is integral to the transformation of infrastructure and operations at Westpac as detailed in our GroupTech strategy,” Holmes said.

Millett’s new role will focus on consolidating Westpac’s relations with strategic partners to help formulate options and approaches for a cohesive infrastructure and operations overhaul at the bank.

Previously, Millett worked as interim Chief Information Officer at Westpac New Zealand, as part of an internal management restructure that saw the CIO position elevated to the executive leadership team, with digital transformation and innovation seen as key priorities for Westpac New Zealand moving forward.

Millett’s replacement is Dawie Olivier, formerly the Executive Head of Group Technology Build at Standard Bank Group in Johannesburg, South Africa, who was appointed as Chief Information Officer for Westpac in February earlier this year. Olivier now takes over from Millett and will report to Westpac New Zealand CEO David McLean.

Speaking to FST Media in an interview in March, Millett outlined the importance of building a “service revolution” and reaffirmed Westpac’s ongoing commitment to knowing “customers better.”

“We want to empower our customers and amaze them. To achieve this, we are executing a number of critical initiatives as a result of refreshing our Telecom contract and extending our outsourcing agreement with IBM,” Millett said.

“Specifically we are fitting out a new data centre, establishing a private modular cloud to support our dev-ops environment, as well as exploiting our big data analytics capability through the implementation of our Watson Explorer solution. I will continue to drive excellence in execution as we focus relentlessly on enabling our businesses to win in the market.

In October 14 last year, a Gartner report titled Sprinting Toward Successful I&O Transformation examined the challenges involved as part of a process of business transformation that is geared at meeting the demands of the digital customer today. According to the report, financial services organisations that pursue a “long, rigid process improvement or transformation plans experience increased risk of failure.”

However, Millett views the opportunity as a new challenge, and is keen to build on his current work of an omni-channel transformation that has seen Westpac New Zealand driving its data analytics capabilities and digitising process flows to simplify and improve the customer experience.

“You have to be positive, passionate and energetic in a high pressure environment,” he told FST Media.

“We live in an amazing time and the ability we have to influence and drive transformational change is phenomenal. My team look to me to be highly motivated under pressure and that just means that is what I have to do.”