ANZ boosts banker iPad rollout

ANZ Bank will significantly expand an iPad rollout to its bankers with another 1200 users to be added by the end of the year.

The program, which stems from a pilot project announced this time last year, currently supports some 300 commercial bankers.

Today the bank said (pdf) an expansion of the program was justified by the rollout's enhancement of "mobility, sales effectiveness and productivity" for bankers.

ANZ also used its half-year results announcement today to provide an update on a $1.5 billion transformation program of works announced in October last year.

Dubbed 'Banking on Australia', components of the program include intelligent ATMs, videoconferencing systems for regional branches, and more mobile payment systems.

ANZ said 200 of 800 planned new ATMs would be installed by the end of 2013. Videoconferencing facilities had been fully deployed.

'Banking on Australia' also encompasses small business and enterprise-focused mobile payment platforms.

The small business-oriented FastPay system, which enables credit card transactions via an iOS application, has had 23,000 downloads and has 6500 active merchants since launching in October last year, the bank said.

ANZ noted that a quarter of the active merchants were "new to bank", hinting at the expanded business it has been able to garner by launching the mobile payment system.

The bank also said a mobile extension for the Transactive cash management system for corporate customers, launched in February this year, had amassed 1684 users from 584 customers, representing about 9 percent take-up from the total Transactive customer base.