The Client
For 185 years, Westpac Banking Corporation has provided financial services to the Asia Pacific region. Founded as the Bank of New South Wales in Sydney in April 1817, today Westpac Banking Corporation has global assets of $190 billion. With its branches and affiliates in Australia, New Zealand and several Pacific Island countries, as well as the International Finance Centers, Westpac provides banking, investment, insurance and other financial services to more than 8.2 million customers.

The Challenge
In 1999, Westpac's Pacific Banking Division was seeking to implement additional electronic banking channels via Telephone, ATM and EFTPOS for its growing customer bases in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific. The division also wanted to implement a standardized electronic bill payment infrastructure for its bank operations, to make it easier for billers to use the banks' services and easier for bank customers to pay bills. They turned to Euronet Worldwide for assistance.

The Solution
In May 1999 Westpac Fiji contracted with Euronet for Integrated Transaction Management® (ITM) to fully integrate their Fiserv ICBS back office system with ATM Management, Card Management, POS Management, Merchant Management, Telephone Banking and Bill Payment. Soon Westpac, one of Fiji's oldest banks, became the first in the country to offer Telephone Banking, enabling customers to do their banking 24 hours a day, 7 days a week via an automated Interactive Voice Response Unit. Since then, the bank has also introduced EFT Point-of-Sale (POS) and ATM services. Westpac Bank PNG Ltd. followed with the launch of POS Management, 24-hour Telephone Banking and Bill Payment services to customers in Papua New Guinea. And beginning in December 2000, Euronet and Westpac began to help standardize the National Bill Payment Systems in both Fiji and Papua New Guinea -- a project quickly completed in Fiji by January 2001 and in Papua New Guinea by March 2001.

Westpac continues to partner actively with Euronet to extend its electronic delivery services into additional locations: the Cook Islands, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu. In this third phase of the bank's electronic delivery strategy, Westpac and Euronet are building a standardized transaction processing gateway based around Euronet's GoldNet/ITM System. The Fiji network will serve as the "hub" for the Pacific Islands, enabling each location to issue/acquire Visa and MasterCard transactions and to issue the proprietary Westpac HandyCard for use at all ATM/POS installations. Also planned is the implementation of a standard Internet Banking solution for all Westpac Pacific Banking location.

The Results
By taking advantage of Euronet's integrated software solutions, Westpac's banking networks ensure consistency of transaction and payment/balance information across widely diverse electronic touchpoints.

"As we grow and expand our banking services, Euronet's integrated approach helps us to streamline data entry with a single source, reduce software training costs and improve the overall quality of our customer service," said Peter Mills, Westpac's Head of Technology Distribution & Operations for the Pacific. "By early 2003, our banks will have transitioned successfully from a traditional ‘bricks and mortar' approach to a fully electronic transactions environment. Westpac will have the most modern and comprehensively integrated Electronic Delivery System in the entire Pacific."