Bank of New Zealand Invests in Identity for a Better Customer Experience

The Objective

Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) has been serving customers for more than 150 years. One of the nation’s big four banks, they offer retail, business, and institutional financial services. BNZ has around 5,000 staff and 145 branches.

BNZ’s mission is to help New Zealanders be good with money so they can do great things with it. To effectively manage their money, customers need to have the right tools, visibility, and experiences. With this in mind, BNZ was keen to take a customer-centric approach when looking to reinvent the way customers engage with BNZ online and in person.

The Challenge

BNZ recognized that to be a truly digital bank means not only investing in technology and people but tackling business processes that hold them back from a seamless customer experience. Connecting customer interactions across the bank in a truly digital ecosystem requires the ability to identify and authenticate users online but also in person and on the phone. To do this, it’s critical to have a single customer view and connected systems while prioritizing security and customer experience.

To achieve their objective, BNZ needed a solution to manage customer authentication and identity that would enable simpler integration with third-party services, provide a platform to support API authentication, and authenticate to multiple BNZ apps seamlessly.

The Solution

The BNZ Digital team migrated internet banking customers to digital identities to create a single source of identities that could be used by multiple systems across the bank. This involved migrating over 500,000 customers to a new infrastructure, automatically shifting them to the new platform the next time they logged on. The migration occurred seamlessly and without any customer impact.

“Identity is at the heart of creating truly customer-centric banking experiences,” says Stephen Bowe, BNZ’s General Manager of Digital & Applications. “Building a genuine digital identity capability has formed a critical foundation on which we can provide the seamless experiences our customers demand, regardless of their channel of choice.”

Ping Identity has supported BNZ in our identity journey as we transform for a digital world, putting customers in control of their identity and their banking.

Stephen Bowe

General Manager of Digital and Applications

The Results

BNZ’s investment in identity capabilities has opened the door for Open Banking. Because changes that previously would have taken six months or more can now be completed in less than half the time, BNZ is now leading the charge for Open Banking in New Zealand. The team can also create better authentication experiences, enabling customers to reset their passwords easier online and in their BNZ mobile app using PIN and touch verification. Customers can also now prove who they are when calling in on the phone through an automated push notification to their BNZ mobile app.

More About Bank of New Zealand

Founded in 1861, Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) is committed to being an integral part of a high-achieving New Zealand and helping its customers be good with money.

BNZ employs around 5,000 people to help its 1.2 million customers across the country. With 145 retail branches and 33 partner business centers throughout New Zealand, the bank works with personal, business, agriculture, charity, and private wealth clients, offering services including retail, small business, commercial, corporate, agribusiness, institutional, and investment, and insurance.

BNZ is also one of New Zealand's largest carbon-neutral companies and is committed to helping make New Zealand's communities stronger. Bank of New Zealand is a subsidiary of the National Australia Bank Group of companies and is governed locally by a fully empowered New Zealand Board of Directors. To learn more, visit the BNZ website.