The bank said it is using AWS agents built on Amazon’s Bedrock AgentCore infrastructure to process customer payslips when they apply for credit cards and home loans.
As reported by iTnews, speaking at the AWS Financial Services Symposium in Sydney, Westpac chief data, digital and AI officer Andrew McMullan said that AI is now “a core part of how the organisation delivers value to our customers”.
“We have been partnering with AWS to use AgentCore to remove the complexity from some of our lending processes,” McMullan said.
“We’ve now got specialist agents working alongside our bankers to make our customers’ lives easier.”
The agentic AI will cut down processing times on payslips, which the bank said it processes 32,000 of every week, and “more than 1.5 million transactions”.
The bank is running an “account scrutiny agent” for processing transactions and manual bank statements, while two other agents extract data from payslips and verify details against policy.
Together, the agents are saving the bank “more than 150,000 hours”, which McMullan said can be reinvested to improve customer service.
“For customers, a payslip is just one document in an application process. For our people, verifying it can be really complex, time-consuming, and full of policy judgements,” he said.
“Now our specialist agents work together around the banker. They can classify the payslip, they read it, they can extract the data, run the calculations in the back, and verify it against policy before giving our banker the output to review and continue the application with speed, confidence, and trust.
“This now means our bankers spend less time wrestling with documents and much more time helping our customers move through one of the biggest financial decisions of their lives.”
The AI analysis of payslips is also benefiting the credit card application process, once again reducing processing times, particularly when customers make errors.
“Customers can sometimes upload the wrong document – maybe the payslip’s a little bit out of date,” McMullan said.
“Historically, that would have created a delay, [or] some rework for the banker.
“Now our bankers are working alongside the specialist [AI] agents, and we provide feedback in real time, so customers can correct the issue immediately and continue with confidence.
“For every customer, every day matters. Avoiding delays matters.”
McMullan added that the agents are not prototypes, but fully specialised agents that are running in its production systems that are extracting data, applying bank policy and working with bankers to confirm analysis. Most importantly, a human is still in the loop.
“Our bankers continue to have oversight and help customers make decisions. For us at Westpac, it’s all about removing friction and complexity from the process, so our customers who are applying for a mortgage or waiting for an approval for lending are getting to an answer more quickly and with greater confidence,” he said.
The partnership with AWS has allowed the bank to reduce the time of agent production, too, from an initial six-month period to “about four to six weeks”.
“In partnership, we’re moving at pace,” he said.
“Our ambition is simple. We want to build agentic operations to support our people [to] serve our customers better.
“Agentic operations are about reducing the distance between intent and outcome. Decisions will now move faster because intelligence is available exactly when it’s needed in the process.”
