Company Overview

Ranked among the top four banks in Australia, one of the top 50 banks globally by market capitalization, and the largest banking group in New Zealand and the Pacific, ANZ Bank boasts a rich heritage spanning 196 years. It operates in nearly 30 markets worldwide, with a strong presence in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Pacific, Europe, America, and the Middle East. In 2022, ANZ introduced the ANZ Plus app to its customers, giving them a smart, secure, digital experience to manage their money.

The Challenge

ANZ Bank strives to operate a zero-downtime environment and continually modernizes to help meet that goal. Achieving a well-integrated system when components are frequently changing was a significant challenge.

“Everything happens now. You can't wait for what we used to refer to as ‘an overnight batch.’ That's not good enough anymore. Everything has to be instantaneous," says Hayden Whitten, Product Area Lead for Mainframe, NonStop, and Batch Infrastructure at ANZ Bank. “That's definitely made us change direction in the type of technologies that we're investing in.”

“The infrastructure components that we're running are world-class. They're less than two years old at any given time. So, modernizing is about the customer experience,” says Whitten. “If we're using products that were written 20 years ago, they might still provide that function, but we need to modernize them because of the cost of running those legacy platforms. The people with the deep technical expertise in those particular product sets are looking to pass the torch to the next generation of engineers.”

The Solution

ANZ Bank had fewer routes to improvement than many other enterprises because its hardware and core banking software were already up to date. For ANZ Bank, improvement would need to come from optimizing the infrastructure it already had. That led Whitten’s team to reexamine its existing support tools and how their integration impacted operations.

“Day to day, a big challenge for my team and others at ANZ is the tooling that we use. If you don't have the right tools and products, then you can't service those customers in the way that you need to service them,” says Whitten. “Getting interoperability among these products without having to use in-house written scripts to transfer data from one to the other is tough. So, it's critical that we find products that can talk to each other.”

Control-M gave ANZ Bank the interoperability and automation to optimize its entire environment. Previously used within some areas of the company, Control-M was extended to business-critical mainframe operations to provide automation plus the ability to orchestrate application and data workflows across the entire infrastructure.

“For many years we'd considered consolidation of the product set for workflow orchestration, but there were always too many risks involved. A significant part of the influence in reaching that tipping point was not just the product sets the BMC had, but their ability to help us migrate,” says Whitten.

The processes that used to be done with proprietary scripts developed and enhanced over decades now execute automatically and consistently through Control-M.

“Any and all applications that ANZ Bank runs use Control-M for their workflow orchestration,” says Whitten. “Whether they're on mainframe or any other platform, they all use the same product now, and that's been quite a game changer for us.”

The Results

Since expanding Control-M’s role to provide enterprise-wide workflow orchestration, ANZ Bank has reduced operational costs by 20 percent. That includes savings from consolidating software tooling, improving system performance, and making better use of staff members’ skills.

Control-M’s ability to work seamlessly with multiple software and infrastructure components enabled ANZ Bank to reduce its schedulers and reduce other support tools. In turn, that has enabled individual staff members to support more software environments.

“We have teams that used three to four different products at any given moment. To bring them down to one product is fantastic,” says Whitten. That means we can optimize the teams to say, in our case, ‘You are no longer a mainframe Control-M engineer or a distributed Control-M engineer. You're simply a Control-M engineer. You can solve that problem for the customer, no matter the platform on which it's running.’ I think that speaks to the ease of use of Control-M.”

In addition to consolidating tools and roles, Control-M also consolidated application and data workflows, allowing them to execute faster because there are fewer overall jobs and better orchestration.

“One of the key benefits we've had in the mainframe space is we've been able to consolidate and clean up hundreds of thousands of jobs because Control-M does things more efficiently than the other product set,” says Whitten. “Whether that's the job scheduling or the number of jobs that are required to achieve the same outcome, Control-M is far more efficient. Workflow orchestration allows us to do what used to be a manual activity, like running a script within an application. You might be able to achieve that 30 times in an hour. We are now doing that 30,000 times in an hour because we can automate it, we can design the schedules, design the application jobs, trigger it all through Control-M, and we don't need somebody running it.”