This article was written from the keynote at the Salesforce Financial Services Summit 2025 event held at ICC Sydney on May 20 2025.
ANZ Bank is investing heavily in Salesforce and trialling its Agentforce agents as part of a program to improve the pace of innovation and operational efficiency.
Speaking at the Salesforce Financial Services Summit 2025, Gerard Florian, ANZ’s group executive for technology, said the twin goals were part of a “simplicity agenda” that included standardising platforms across the bank. ANZ can then implement more easily any innovations developed by the vendor on that platform.
ANZ has standardised platforms across the bank’s retail, commercial and institutional arms. This has sped up feature delivery, reduced servicing costs, and provided a more consistent customer experience, Florian said.
“You get the benefit of what the partner puts into the platform, and at the same time enable teams to innovate in their own areas,” Florian said.
The most visible outcome of this strategy is ANZ Plus, the bank’s new retail platform built with Salesforce. Florian said ANZ Plus has delivered features to market five times faster than legacy systems, cut the cost of acquiring and servicing customers by more than 30 percent, and posted a net promoter score above 50 for new account onboarding.
Florian is now looking at whether Agentforce can improve productivity further, perhaps through helping staff prepare for meetings or follow up clients.
However, Florian also warned companies about the latest technologies distracting them from the real goal of IT – to improve processes.
“While we're all very interested in AI as the technology of the day, one of the potential risks is that it becomes a distraction, because we end up with lots of little experiments that don't get to scale,” Florian said.
“The model we're trying to apply within ANZ is, let's make sure we start with the process and understand it end to end. Then we break it down into tasks. And then we also think about the data that's involved in that process – whether it's the payload data, so a resume for recruitment, pay slips for a loan approval – as well as the metadata that sits around it. Then you start to have a conversation – where does AI fit in? Is it a simple case of using some machine learning? Is it a generative or agentic AI opportunity?”
Florian also said that financial organisations will end up managing a range of agents that operate within and across multiple platforms.
“There will be tasks that may be better done by a different agent. So how do we get hand-off between them?” Florian said. A relationship manager creating a report of a client’s service experience over the past 12 months would need to pull data from ServiceNow, which manages ANZ’s service management data.
Florian also addressed the human side of transformation. Following the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, ANZ set up an AI Immersion Centre to help executives and staff understand the potential and the limits of generative AI. More than 2,000 employees have gone through the program, which combines hands-on experience with structured discussions about opportunity and risk. “We had to embrace this, not resist it,” he said.
With a strong platform foundation, a pragmatic approach to AI, and a clear change strategy, ANZ is positioning itself as a model for how large banks can modernise without losing customer trust. As Florian put it, “This is probably the single biggest change program we will all go through over the next few years.”
