Heritage People's Choice
Heritage People’s Choice Credit Union is now Australia’s largest member owned community bank following the merger in early 2023 of Queensland-based Heritage Bank and South Australia’s People’s Choice Credit Union. Their mission is to empower their members to create the life they want, through modern banking and personal service. The combined organisation has approximately 720,000 members, 1,900 employees, 95 branch and service locations, and more than $23 billion in total assets.
The challenge
Through the merger transformation program, with a focus on uplifting the member experience, People’s Choice embarked on a significant upgrade to their digital platforms to enable faster and more effective member management and delivery of services. A key pillar of the transformation was an upgrade to the core banking application to ensure the operational efficiencies and scalability required for the newly merged organisation could be achieved. The core banking application is connected to all member facing services, so it was vital that this complex upgrade be managed with a disciplined approach to ensure member services are not disrupted.
The approach
With the commitment to delivering a seamless upgrade to its core banking system, Heritage People’s Choice engaged an experienced team of Escient project specialists to work with the upgrade team and multiple vendor partners to successfully deliver the program. By working collaboratively with all stakeholders and focusing on an uplift in governance practices, the following improvements were made:
- Increased confidence in the testing and quality management of project deliverables
- Negotiated revised arrangements with one of the key vendors to improve the working relationship, and significantly reduce the risk they posed to delivering a quality outcome on time
- Established clear roles and responsibilities within the delivery team to improve teamwork, communication and morale
- Fostered an environment where risk management was owned by the whole team, leading to more proactive identification and control of risks
- Greater engagement with other project teams to more effectively manage dependencies and shared risks across the portfolio
Escient were engaged to help reshape our Core Banking Upgrade Program, which is a critical enabler to our proposed integration of the People’s Choice and Heritage Bank systems landscape. Throughout the engagement, Escient have demonstrated very strong program planning, design and execution capabilities as well as very effective stakeholder and vendor management. Escient resources have been proven to be highly capable professional and dedicated.
— Andy Weir, Group Chief Information Officer
Heritage & People’s Choice Ltd
The outcome
The core banking upgrade remains on track to achieve its delivery date and once completed, will enable Heritage People’s Choice to confidently deliver on their commitment to superior member experience. It will also enable the future transformation program to deliver new systems integrated with a stable, scalable core banking platform.
