Vince Pierce is General Manager (Group Transformation) at Westpac Next, the team designing and building the new generation of the bank’s service delivery platform. He ensures the customer experience is at the heart of all product strategy, service delivery, and business operations. At Digital Edge, He talks with Matthew Hanley, Partner at ADAPT, about mapping the customer journey to product development.

Matthew Hanley:

I’m here today with Vince Pierce, GM of transformation for Westpac Next. Thank you for joining us and for your keynote presentation.

How would you adopt new mindsets and in culture into the business with change, one story at a time? It requires constant relentless reinforcement.

Vincent Pierce:

I probably spend without exaggeration $40 or $50 a week just buying people coffee, sitting down having a conversation, understanding their perspective.

First of all, and like we laid out in our Changemaker journey, it’s inspiring the need to change. And we do that in Westpac Next through empathy.

Let us first understand the situation. We’re running as a bank. What’s the situation our customers are in, and how might we think about that differently? Free ourselves from the shackles of yesterday? Westpac is now over 200 years old, so we have at long, deep heritage. So that’s a big monster to pivot into a move.

Matthew Hanley:

You don’t pick it all at once? I wouldn’t say.

Vincent Pierce:

I think it was Simon Waller, or maybe it was the Amazon Web Services team, who talked about how you don’t run a marathon, you just take one step at a time. So when we envision our end to end services, we use journey mapping and value stream mapping.

We ultimately look at it like an image that’s made up of thousands of pixels. And those pixels are the individual interactions and the way we’ve staged the services. And we change those one at a time.”

We don’t change the entire customer experience at once – well, sometimes we do. But those changes are few and far between.

The days of monolithic projects and monolithic technology programs are on the way out. They’ll remain, you always need to replace the core at some stage, at 20 or 30 year intervals. But what replacing that monolithic mindset is microservices is continuous improvement, every process, every interaction, every person, every day. If we all just focused on the 1% improvement we could make in this next sprint I think we could all sign up for 1%. We couldn’t get everybody thinking about 1% and the one interaction and you multiply that by thousands of people across the enterprise where you’re empowering and enabling those people, then that’s transformational.

We spin it internally now as a service. What’s happening is that the transformation group as a service is getting plugged into this happening. We have been on the road and making this shift for years. And sometimes it takes years when you especially when you have a 200-year-old bank with a deep heritage as we do. But we frame the role of technology in Westpac to enable capabilities the business can leverage to serve customers better and provide capabilities directly to customers, so they can bank with a better experience. So that’s how we frame technology as an enabler to bankers and customers.

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Vince Pierce and Westpac’s customer journey
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Contributors
Matthew Hanley Partner and Executive Manager, Strategic Partner Engagement
Matthew believes that Australia needs systemic and sustainable organisational change, and Technology is where businesses really now compete! He brings over 15+... More

Matthew believes that Australia needs systemic and sustainable organisational change, and Technology is where businesses really now compete!

He brings over 15+ years of international experience, commercial acumen, and business processes that has solidified ADAPT as the premier business community in the market.

As an authentic connector of C-Level executives, board members & educational technology evangelists, Matthew has a real passion for understanding current trends and challenges, while utilizing intelligent and strategic data insights to equip the C-Suite with knowledge and competencies to make better decisions.

Between 2015 to 2018 Matthew led and managed ADAPTs Delegate Advisory Team, constructing one of the most talented advisor business units in Asia Pacific. The team of 14 being responsible for quality, integrity and the execution & delivery of all delegate acquisition and advisory programs for ADAPT. His business unit delivered:

  • 100% Target Delivery Hit on all campaigns 2015 to 2018
  • +423% Growth Increase in private programs from 2015 to 2018
  • +20% Growth Increase in flagship programs from 2017 to 2018
  • While propelling ADAPT through this hot streak, Matthew was also Awarded; Employee of the year 2016.

Matthew sits on ADAPT’s leadership team, leads & mentors with EQ – & believes “Positivity” and “Humour” are two underrated and powerful assets in business and team building.. A book that really influenced Matthew in early life was “Key to Living the Law of Attraction”.

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Vincent Pierce GM at Westpac NEXT
Vince moved to Australia and joined the Westpac Group in August 2016 as the General Manager of Westpac Next, the team driving... More

Vince moved to Australia and joined the Westpac Group in August 2016 as the General Manager of Westpac Next, the team driving the design and delivery of Westpac Group’s Service Revolution Transformation.

Reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, Gary Thursby, Vince leads a team of 80+ employees who collaborate and partner with Westpac’s business units to shape the way business innovates, transforms and operates to remain relevant, competitive and the brand of choice for Westpac’s 14+ million customers.

He brings over 25 years of experience and expertise successfully
working with companies from starts-ups to global enterprises. His passion lies in his committment to re-engineer their approach to incorporating customer experience at the heart of all product strategy, service delivery, and business operations. This proven formula has driven significant and sustained profitable growth and shareholder value for companies who have found themselves in increasingly competitive and complex digital landscapes.

Vince has a passion for the end-to-end customer journey approach of transformation driven by the many internal and external customer experiences that take place across a company on any given day. He is recognised for helping teams from the shop floor to the top floor to understand, embrace and apply the principles and practices of Design, Lean, Agile, and Innovation, enabling and empowering teams to shape and reinforce a culture of iterative development and continuous learning and operational excellence that consistently delivers breakthrough outcomes.

Before joining the Westpac Group, Vince held a variety of senior leadership roles including Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for leading tax services firm Ryan and Senior Vice President for Global Business Transformation at Office Depot. His longest tenure was with consultancy Accenture where he rose from Manager to Partner in the Business Process Outsourcing division, ultimately responsible for a diverse portfolio of engagements across the financial services, consumer products, technology, utilities and government sectors.

Vince holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Organizational Management from Cabrini University in Pennsylvania and an Associate of Science (A.S.) Field Of Study Industrial Engineering from Delaware Tech.

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Management Customer Experience