About Westpac Bank
Westpac Banking Corporation is an Australia based bank and other financial services, provider. This organization is commonly known as Westpac Bank. Company headquarter is located at 275 Kent St, Sydney, New South Wales. Name of the bank Westpac is a Portmanteau of Western and Pacific. Bank is reported in the list of Australia’s “Big Four” Banks. As per 2018, the bank has around 4 million customers served by almost 40,000 employees (Westpac, 2018c).
The factors influencing the success of an organization or business are varied from business to business and often beyond the control of entrepreneurs. However, there are some factors that help the organization to sustainable growth in the competitive economic market. Westpac bank also identifies its critical success factors and categorized into three different categories like internal, external, and community factors (Westpac, 2014a).
Internal
- Attitude: confidence of the bank to be innovative as well as taking risks.
- Purpose: Bank has clarity about its enterprise objectives.
External
- Prime locations of the bank.
- Easy access to the economic market.
- Favourable economic conditions and regulatory environment.
- Its efficient government policies
Community
- It has separated politics and business.
- Its network and partnerships in the communities.
- Independent dispute resolution policies.
2013 Accessibility Action plan of the bank was based on the theme of “Prosper and Grow”, now in order to see the change that company wants to see, the bank has made its commitment in the following areas for the accessibility action plan of 2017-2020:
- Creating an inclusive workplace that ensures that people leading the organization are equipped and committed to creating a fulfilling career for all its employees.
- Growing the financial independence of the organization.
- Embedding the accessibility of organization in banking products and services.
- Accessible communication and communities.
Westpac bank would require for re-designing its existing infrastructure of the organization to build a structure that will help to provide essential skills and training to its new employees. Use of creative and strategic designs for the new strategy will be needed for the development of an environment suitable for the training and career development of new or un-experienced employees. For financial independency organization will need more assets than a liability in term of its financial growth. Also to embedding the accessibility of banking products and services it is essential to train its employees for such practices, for this bank can rely on its leadership programs to train its employees.
In the context of Westpac bank, as per the organization’s vision-mission statement is given as To help the organization’s customers, communities, and people to prosper and grow along with the bank making it one of the world’s great services (Westpac, 2018b).
Current system of Westpac bank of Australia
Information systems or other IT components of banking organizations have a determining role for its internal environment along with a significant level of relations with its external environment. The organization has “Corporate Online” as its online platform where customers can view, manage and track their accounts. This service is specially designed for the corporate and business customers from Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinean, and Fijian. For the successful organization, it is critically essential to stay connected with their customers. Corporate online portal of the bank is designed to provide the flexibility and a secured platform giving a full control to its customer’s banking activities. Organization’s business structure comprises of five divisions:
Factors Influencing the Success of Westpac Bank
Consumer Bank: This division is responsible for organizations sales and services to the customers.
Business Bank: This division takes care of the company sales and services to the SMEs, Micro, and Other commercial business customers. This individual division makes a business of about $150 million.
BT Financial group Australia: This division is responsible for the organization’s manufacture and distribution of the investments.
Westpac Institutional Bank: This division delivers a broad range of products and services to the commercial business customers with connections to Australia and New Zealand.
Westpac New Zealand: This is designed to take care of the overall business of the company in New Zealand.
In the rising technical world, the bank has implemented an integrated information technology in its Corporate Online system. Along with this bank has implemented several IT services to its daily operations within the organization. Since daily operations of the bank are very cautious to the customer’s bank give a special consideration to its security implementations regarding different IT solutions. Bank has been regarded as one of the most advanced banks of Australia. This is because of its advanced technical aspects. Apart from this, mobile banking is one of the most successful implementations of technology for the bank. This system is linked to its Corporate Online system or this is the part of Corporate Online system. This would help the bank in terms of its business by making its customers able to operate their bank account activities so easily.
With the implementation of online systems like corporate online, the bank has to maintain a high-security form to protect the digital operations of the customer. For the bank one of the major problems is meeting the authentication standards. For this bank follows different mechanisms for security concerns within the digital operation of banking services (Chileshe, and John Kikwasi, 2014). In order to avail the mobility facility of baking operation with its mobile banking, the customer would use this facility in any form at any place. With this facility provided by the Westpac Bank, its customer can perform their banking operations like, fund transfer, and many more with the help of their user-friendly mobile banking service (Lee, Thomas, and Baskerville, 2015). This facility will also make them able to check their available balance, their transactions, and other services for making payments and all (Martins, Oliveira, and Popovi?, 2014).
There have been found various cases of forgery and hacks in the recent times. This makes it more important for the bank to secure their online services. If customers get the feeling of security concerns they will withdraw their business from the bank. This will impact the organization’s business very badly. This issue may seem to be casual but security concerns of the bank are the most powerful factor that plays an important role in its success and failure. Customers in the banking sector are seeking for the security of their assets and in such environment, security breach can cause a huge loss to the bank. Security ensuring mechanisms of the bank are facing different issues in the system. Attacks from unauthentic users are the most dangerous issue that bank is facing in the recent time. Certainly, this issue has been regarded as the top most priority of the bank in terms of ensuring the security.
Organization Structure of Westpac Bank
Another weakness of the bank is its increasing number of increasing frauds in the recent times. Organization’s online services are facing such issues like fraud and hacks from digital thieves. To maintain the high profile of bank in such environment or circumstances is creating an issue in bank’s digital services. The bank is receiving complaints from customers regarding frauds through different mediums like SMS, E-mail, Phone Scam Alert, and Malicious alerts to the customer. In such issues bank is not capable of doing anything to resolve. This is making a serious issue for the bank to maintain its customers’ faith in their services. Some other issues that are to be faced by banking organization due to their digital services are found in the organization.
Primary features of the new system
In the banking sector, security of banking services like digital or online banking is to mmost priority of any bank. In the recent times, apart from the typical banking strategies, digitalization of the banking services is rising rapidly (Xiong, and Li, 2017). These technology implementations in the banking sector are showing tremendous improvements in the banking services as well as in their operations. Along with this ease of doing business, organizations are also facing several security issues as defined above (Ponte, Carvajal-Trujillo, and Escobar-Rodríguez, 2015). There are some really improved systems like Biometrics, Integration of PLS with HLS standards, and upgraded organization structure as well as mainframe system of the organization operational activities to DB2 and UNIX (Nazareth, and Choi, 2015).
Westpac Bank can adapt an extreme level of consumer faith in their service by providing services like biometric authentications for online services. This implementation will surely help the organization to build a high-level trust of customers with their bank. Also, the method of using biometrics will reveal the physical behavior of customers. Since the biometric information of an individual is different from others, therefore, it will be very useful for the banking system. This use of a unique identity for security authentication will be very difficult to hack or copy in frauds. This uniqueness is genetic that cannot be modified or copied from anyone. Hence, for the security concern of bank, it is suggested to use the biometric user authentication for digital services of the Westpac Bank. Other services that Westpac bank can include in its security system are hand use recognition, face expression recognition, and voice recognition of customers. There are various researches in this field which show that these are the most successful technologies for security purpose (Devadevan, 2013).
IT Infrastructure of Westpac Bank
In order to secure the digital services of Westpac bank, integration of PLS with HLS would be most beneficial. PLS interface operates on non-supportable platforms that are not enough good for banking operations. In this interface, the bank has to perform the online data entry for every loan application based on the PLS system. This introduces an extra cost to the bank and affects the financial expenditures. Therefore, in order to reduce the cost, improve the functionality level of bank operations, and to optimize this level of functionality, Westpac bank should integrate its PLS system with the HLS system. With this integration of PLS and HLS, Westpac bank would be successful; in excelling its customer services with the improved IT services. IT infrastructure of Westpac bank has a successful history in terms of providing good services to the customers associated with the organization. And then such implementation of such improvements in the IT infrastructure of the organization will help in making a fast decision of application approvals, funds, differentiation between bigger products and ultimately improve the pace of approving applications.
Westpac bank has higher form of IT structure that is based on different IT systems. With the use of upgraded technology in its system, the bank must upgrade the system. For this up gradation, the bank must use high level operating systems like UNIX and DB2 instead of its existing version of Windows OS. With the up-gradation, the bank would feel safe to protect its online services like online banking and mobile banking. Being the most critical issue of a security breach, this change in the mainframe of IT structure will reduce most of the issues. Also, with this upgraded mainframe of IT system bank will be able to enhance the overall efficiency of the banking operations within the organization and will also help in reducing the cost of operations significantly (Vasilakos, Li, Simon, and You, 2015).
Along with this restructuring of IT systems, Westpac bank should implement the automation technology in some of its organizational operations to increase the security level, monitor the organizations existing IT systems, and enabling the organization to higher processing speed in some of the technical tasks like filtration of forms and other operations.
This new system can be classified under the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) system. This system is another form of interchanging the information between authorities within the organization. in order to process the standardised information in a particular fformat, this system will help a lot to the Westpac bank. Implementation of this system will help the organization to spread vital information to its business partners of commercial customers along with reducing the risk of confidentiality (Erkan, and Evans, 2016). This is because the data shared would be in an electronically secured format. This will help the organization to keep their data safe without losing it in any fraud or thread. Mainly data leakages occur at the time of data transfer, therefore, transferring the data in an electronic format will keep the data safe while transferring from one system to another (Jain, Keneley, and Thomson, 2015).
Security Concerns for Westpac Bank
This use of EDI system within the organization’s existing system would be helpful for the new information system to support the efficiency of organization with higher efficiency of workflow, and streaming various processes at a time related to the document transfer. This would save a significant amount of time for the organization. In this way, the banking operations will function faster and the saved time can be utilized to prepare other business strategies for the business sustainability. Also, the process of EDI is very cost effective, therefore, implementation of the EDI system will also make the system cost-effective (Fenna, 2013).
Online or digital banking is one among the services provided by most of the organization in the banking sector. This service allows their customers to interact with their bank activities directly and give an access to operate their bank activities with mobility (Mata, et al., 2015). Westpac banking is also providing the same services to enhance the customer satisfaction to fulfill their expectations. Such online systems are developed to enhance the efficiency of the banking process and make their services easy to use (Henckel, and McKibbin, 2017).
In the technical world, there are various platforms on which different operating systems can be used by banks to provide such services. Platforms like HTML5, Javascript, and CSS have been used by banks with a huge interest. These platforms have been used to develop faster process and high-level systems to operate other IT systems. There are many systems developed and successfully (Jiménez, Lopez, and Saurina, 2013).
The process of accounting through computerised system involves different financial and non-financial attributes like storing and retrieving the data of accounting transactions. In this manner the ER diagram of new system will contain the following attributes:
Data processing cycle: Data processing involves a complete practice of collecting, storing, relating, analysing, and computing the data. This whole process forms a cycle that is called data processing cycle. This cycle involve the necessary steps of capturing, processing and computing the data.
Designing database for accounting: In accounting, both the computerised and computer based AIS requires a definite data structure that has to be design with maximum efficiency. These databases are used to store the customer information data for future use.
Entity relationship (ER) model: This model is commonly used in database-oriented applications. Westpac bank will use this model in its new information system. This will help the organization to monitors its entities on periodic basis.
Proposal for New Information System
In the banking sector, there are various risks associated with the typical IT systems used in banking operations. Some of the potential threats of security concern for Westpac bank in Australia are discussed below:
Trojan horse attacks: Such attacks on a banking organization invites attackers. These attackers can easily invite Trojan to the bank systems. This can be made possible through keyloggers of a user computer system. Such attacks occur normally when a user visits some websites or download some file containing malfunctions (Subramaniam, et al., 2015). While accessing the system through these activities or visiting a website or installing the download file these keylogger programs may also get installed without any permission. Once these file installed on the user’s system, attackers can use these key loggers for their benefit (Bhunia et al. 2014).
Malicious Hackers: Such attacks on banking systems are referred to the breach of a user’s proper authentication to use the system. In such attacks, persons from within the organization or from the outside of bank can be involved. And this type of hacking has become more prevalent in the last few years. Also, this hacking enables the access of a system that is used within the bank from another location. For this hackers have to install the malfunctions or hack their authentication details. Once they got such information they can access the system from a distance and no one can detect this until unless they cause any harm to the system directly. Till then, hackers can access the bank systems to use the information saved into their system and can use this information in the market for their own profit (Waemustafa, and Sukri, 2015).
Phishing attacks: In the current scenario banking organization has a lot of business from all over the world and they have their customer’s personal information as well. Keeping this much information stored that is very confidential is the biggest challenge for sectors like banking. Any leakage in such storage can lead to a serious issue for the organization. Leakage of personal information can lead it to its misuse in the form of digital misconducts. The banking sector has identified the issue in their highly developed banking systems and this issue is constantly discussed in their risk factors for a long time.
Man-in-Middle (MIIM) attacks: There is the case in which some other authority creates a fake website to get the personal information of customers like their login details and passwords. In this manner, they can use such information for un-authentic access to their bank account. In these attacks, attackers redirect the users to a fake website to collect this information. Once they got the access they can make transactions from customer account with full authentication also without informing the customer. Along with this data, breaches is another serious issue in such attacks. These attacks can lead the organization to a huge impact on their business in terms of the loss of market value as well as their customer trust.
There are various accounting control procedures and systems in the banking sector to have a better control over the IT systems used within the bank.
Physical Audits: Such audits are made for the protection and audit purpose of physical assets of the organization. There are always many projects of larger scale requiring a periodic audit quarterly or half yearly. Such audits should be made within the physical audits.
Approval authority: In the organization of the banking sector there must be some specified form of the managerial channel to give approval to some sensitive systems. Any breach in the channel may lead to the cases of fraud and lead to fraud transactions from within the organization. a proper channel for the larger transaction can be used to secure the transactions. This approval from this particular channel for larger transactions would be essential to prevent their system form such unscrupulous activities (Ruffell, Banks?Leite, and Didham, 2016).
Access over control: Banking system can use a protected access over their accounting control. Different technologies are available in the technical world to protect the accounting access that has to be followed for authentic access over such sensitive controls. The organization can use some kind of electronic logs to protect their accounting access even for the employees working within the organization.
Conclusion
It is concluded from the above-mentioned study that strategic information system plays a crucial role in Westpac bank. The success and growth of the banking industry are highly dependent on the strategic information system. to prevent such security breaches banking organizations have to improve their information system from time to time to make their business more secure and gain the trust of customers.
References
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