In the cutthroat world of commoditised banking, customer experience is king — and ANZ is looking to dominate by seriously stepping up its AI game.
Speaking at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Summit in Sydney last week, Tim Moloney, head of digital strategy and head of financial institutions sales in the global markets division at ANZ, revealed how the bank is using AI to turn data into a strategic superpower.
“Winning in this space is all about customer experience and we believe that the future of customer experience lies at the intersection of personalisation, predictive analytics and agentic AI,” the former Barclays, Citi and Deutsche Bank exec said.
“Each of these is powerful in isolation, but transformative when combined.”
Sharing details of the upcoming launch of its ‘ANZ Markets Insights Engine’ multi-agent AI chatbot developed with AWS, Moloney explained how the bot — known by the acronym ‘Amie’ — is designed to empower bankers to have deeper, data-rich conversations with clients at pace.
“It will allow our bankers to ask pretty much anything about markets, whether it’s about research, news, policies or of course, customer analytics,” Moloney said to a packed-out Sydney audience of thousands.
“We like to think of Amie as a personalised markets analyst that our bankers can call on anytime, anywhere.”
ANZ operates across 29 countries and processes billions of data points daily, with Moloney highlighting how AWS has been a “transformative” cornerstone partner throughout its innovation journey.
What began as a partnership focused on simple storage has since evolved into data science, AI, data governance and beyond.
According to a January 2025 McKinsey report, the biggest barrier to scaling AI is not employees — who are often ready — but leaders who aren’t steering fast enough.
With research estimating the long-term AI opportunity at US$4.4 trillion in added productivity from corporate use cases, plenty of companies are talking about AI, but far fewer are sharing real-world execution stories.
No longer a far-off concept for ANZ, Moloney said AI is now embedded across the business, reshaping how the bank engages with customers, handles market volatility and scales intelligence across the organisation.
“AI is fundamentally reshaping the way that we engage with our customers, and we are just at the beginning,” Moloney said.
Amie is just the start of what Moloney describes as a federated model for scaling expertise, not just technology.
“Solutions like Amie demonstrate that subject matter experts — say an interest rate specialist — can now build an agent that captures their deep domain knowledge,” he said.
“Those agents can then be deployed across the entire organisation, irrespective of which applications different teams use.”
As generative AI matures, Moloney sees a future where it complements traditional machine learning models, dynamically adapting to customer needs while staying safely within ethical guardrails.
“We’re building for this future with deliberate, safe steps — creating an exceptional customer experience, and through that, helping our customers focus on what they do best: growing their businesses.”
During the AWS Summit, CommBank and AWS also announced what it called one of the largest and fastest data platform migrations in the Southern Hemisphere.
In partnership with AWS and HCLTech, CommBank has now fully shifted its data platform to the cloud, enabling more than 2,000 AI models to process 157 billion data points and make 55 million daily decisions. The move will accelerate the bank’s push into personalisation, innovation and agentic AI.
