Bendigo Bank expands agreement with Google Cloud

Bendigo Bank has awarded Google Cloud a multi-year agreement aimed at ensuring its staff and customers can access AI capabilities and cybersecurity defences.

The agreement, which builds on the bank’s existing relationship with Google Cloud for core digital infrastructure, is designed to enable Bendigo Bank’s team to more effectively use AI, streamline operations and build new team skills. Under the deal, Bendigo Bank will deploy Gemini Enterprise to all employees, and will roll out Gemini Code Assist to help its developers build, test and deploy digital solutions.

The decision follows a pilot of Gemini Enterprise that Bendigo Bank said resulted in substantial time savings and efficiencies, and enabled the deployment of innovative uses for AI across multiple domains.

Examples include the ability to process customers’ lending and financial applications faster with automated lending, title and document search functions, to identify and respond to potential instances of financial crime using custom AI models, and using generative AI to identify product-market gaps.

Bendigo Bank CEO Richard Fennell said the expanded agreement with Google is about democratising AI.

“By putting these tools in the hands of every single one of our people, we’re creating a workforce that’s as well-equipped for the future as possible,” he said. “The digital ecosystem we’ve built with Google Cloud will support our people to adopt an AI-first mindset and leverage this capability in the course of their working day, whether that is developing simpler and higher-quality code or helping customers make more informed choices.”

Google Cloud VP for Australia and New Zealand Paul Migliorini added that the company is deeply committed to its relationship with Bendigo Bank.

“Through our ongoing sharing of knowledge and best practices, we are confident that the bank’s employees will become AI innovators in their own right, setting new standards for customer experience and performance that may resonate across Australia’s entire financial services industry,” he said.

Meanwhile Bendigo Bank has committed to migrating its cybersecurity operations from its existing platform to Google Security Operations and Google Security Command Centre.

The migration will complement the work underway to modernise the bank’s warehousing environments into BigQuery, and its VMware environments onto Google Cloud.

Image credit: iStock.com/NilsBV