Building the ANZx web engineering platform and team
Nicolas Senechal discusses what it takes to build a world-class web engineering team.
ANZ is banking on the idea that to come up with new and different ideas, you need diverse engineering teams and up-to-date tools.
ANZx is a program aimed at re-imagining financial services provided by ANZ. The program focuses on several aspects to achieve this result:
Automating as much as possible, both internally within our development teams and externally for customers.
Enabling customers to reach their personal finance goals in an intuitive and easy way.
Bringing innovative ideas to the market, evolving traditional expectations of banking.
To achieve these results, the ANZx program employs engineers and professionals from extremely different backgrounds. While half of the employees come with a background in banking, the second half come from a wide variety of places, including Apple, REA Group, Facebook, SEEK and Zendesk. This wide approach couples a deep understanding of the finance market with a tech-first mindset, helping us build our product, ANZ Plus.
Over the first three years, the program focused nearly exclusively on the mobile experience. These experiences are feature-rich and released multiple times per week. Until recently, web has not been a point of focus. We started designing web experiences last year, covering very targeted and specific use cases. Both platform and design have matured, and we are now progressing onto more critical pieces. We are aiming at building a best-in-class experience in terms of product, design, and implementation, in line with the program principles.
The initial steps
The web engineering team is currently comprised of 30 engineers. Most of our engineers work in product delivery squads, building experiences inside our shared platform. They work alongside design and product to understand key requirements, building the experience around these needs and aligning to customer value and outcomes. The delivery squads are supported by a platform squad. This platform squad manages the core functionalities of our applications, such as core security requirements, our design system, API communication layer and our OpenTelemetry setup. We also receive targeted help from other parts of the organisation which are more specialised in security, compliance or infrastructure.
We spent twelve months setting up the foundation of our web platform, Bluestone. All future ANZx customer web experiences will be extending Bluestone, leveraging existing code and solutions. Foundational to our decision-making process, we decided early to use Nx, TypeScript, react and Next.js 13. Next has been upgraded to 14 since then, and we will move to 15 once it is out of RC phase. Those decisions were critical to the technical direction of the project, with each team member taking on personal ownership of those choices. As we progressed, we documented those decisions, ensuring future team members understand the rationale behind our technical journey so far.
With most of the team based in Australia, (mainly in Melbourne and a few spread across other states), and Vietnam, it was important that we had a unified approach that connected our squads together and became an ingrained part of our ways of working.
Despite our differences in geographical location – as well as tenure and experience – these shared decisions enable us to unite around one vision. The dedicated time to set up our foundations, the investigations run by the engineers and the ongoing collaboration helped in developing trust between team members and enabled us to start delivering continuously behind a unified goal. Those principles are still valid today and drive communication and technical decisions.
Learning and growing
As we are building the foundation of a banking platform, we knew we needed deeply curious technical engineers prompting the team with the hard (but fun) engineering questions and guiding us towards answers. Accordingly, we have several key individuals in our organisation tasked with deeply exploring and understanding our fundamental technology choices. This approach provided us the collective bandwidth to start mastering and utilising the newness of Next.js 13/14. For instance, server-side components, prompting us to delve into its support for state management and localisation. As we continue to learn and adapt with the technical landscape, we always will look to challenge traditional development paradigms, and how we can leverage technology to deliver a customer experience that is industry leading.
As a team, we are always striving for experiences and infrastructure that exceeds what we have done before. An example of this is our continuous deployment pipeline, where code is pushed to production whenever it is merged to the main branch. We are shipping code to prod a dozen times a day, meeting the expectations of what our team consider good practice. This is a big win, and a testament to the quality of our approach, enabling faster delivery and spending less time on repetitive tasks and process overhead. It is a very rare achievement in the banking industry and we are proud of it.
Transforming technical excellence into product delivery excellence
While our initial deliveries to the market have been modest, they provided us with confidence that we made the right technical choices and have proven the technical capacity of the platform. Everyone has been learning together as a team, drawing from each other's backgrounds and experiences as we push the bounds and face into new challenges and emerging opportunities. All the engineers are excited about the potential ahead, eager to tackle the technical problems that lie in wait.
Alongside our technical focus, we accompany it with an emphasis on end-user needs and value. We have begun enhancing our delivery capabilities by expanding our product delivery teams and mapping out the steps to building the bank of tomorrow. We are ready for the next step in our journey.
[Blog admin’s note: if you want to join us on this journey click here to see what roles are available]
Nicolas Sénéchal has been a Senior Engineering Manager at ANZ for the past two years. Leveraging experiences from EA Games, NVIDIA and SEEK, he provides software development teams with that extra sparkle needed to deliver unique customer-focused products. To achieve this goal, he energises and empowers individuals through technical guidance and a continuous improvement approach, focused on the end-results. LinkedIn profile.
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