Overview
This case study outlines work within Westpac Group’s Business Banking Transformation program to simplify and modernise merchant onboarding and servicing.
Over time, merchant sales and servicing processes had become fragmented across multiple systems, creating unnecessary effort for bankers and delays for customers. What appeared to customers as slow approvals or administrative friction was often the result of complex internal workflows, duplicated data entry and disconnected platforms. The engagement focused on understanding the end-to-end service, reducing operational complexity and designing a unified experience that could support immediate business needs while establishing a foundation for future customer self-service.
Situation
Merchant origination and servicing at Westpac had evolved across multiple platforms over many years. What should have been a coherent end-to-end service had become a patchwork of systems, manual workarounds and duplicated processes.
Bankers routinely moved between up to six different applications to onboard a merchant, manage pricing requests or complete servicing activities. Information was often entered multiple times, customer visibility was fragmented and key decisions relied on coordination between numerous teams.
This created challenges across the organisation:
- Significant manual effort and rework
- Inconsistent processes and compliance risk
- Slow credit and pricing decisions
- Limited visibility of merchant relationships
- Delays and frustration for small business customers
The challenge extended well beyond technology. Merchant onboarding involved frontline bankers, associates, pricing specialists, credit decision-makers and fulfilment teams, all operating within regulatory, product and operational constraints. Any solution needed to improve efficiency for internal teams while delivering tangible benefits for customers.
Task
The objective was to design a unified merchant management platform that would simplify both origination and servicing activities.
The transformation sought to:
- Consolidate onboarding and servicing into a single workflow
- Reduce system switching and duplicated effort
- Improve the speed and quality of pricing and credit decisions
- Provide a more complete view of merchant customers
- Support an MVP release while enabling future expansion
- Establish a foundation for customer self-service capabilities
Achieving these outcomes required more than interface design. The work involved understanding the service as a whole, aligning customer and business needs, simplifying complex workflows and creating an information architecture capable of supporting a highly regulated banking environment.
Action
Understanding the Service End-to-End
The engagement began with extensive discovery across merchant sales and servicing activities. Existing systems, procedures and operational processes were reviewed to understand how work moved through the organisation.
Journey mapping and service blueprinting examined:
- Frontline banker workflows
- Handoffs between pricing, credit and fulfilment teams
- Customer touchpoints and failure moments
- Regulatory and operational requirements
This created a shared understanding of where duplication, delays and unnecessary complexity entered the service.
Connecting Internal and Customer Experiences
Research was conducted with frontline bankers, subject matter experts, fulfilment teams and small business customers involved in merchant onboarding.
A consistent pattern emerged. Internal process inefficiencies were often directly reflected in customer experiences. Where bankers encountered fragmented systems and unclear workflows, customers experienced waiting, uncertainty and repeated requests for information.
Mapping these relationships helped align business priorities with customer outcomes and provided a clearer view of where improvements would create the greatest impact.
Designing for Complexity
One of the most significant challenges was information architecture.
Merchant origination and servicing involved multiple actors, product variations, compliance checkpoints, pricing considerations and long-running workflows. The complexity could not be removed entirely, but it could be organised more effectively.
Design activities focused on:
- Prioritising critical banker tasks for MVP delivery
- Sequencing workflows to reduce cognitive load
- Improving visibility of customer, product and risk information
Iterative Design and Validation
Working within a large multidisciplinary transformation program, concepts were continuously refined through stakeholder reviews, prototype testing and validation sessions.
Design decisions were balanced against business requirements, delivery constraints and compliance obligations while maintaining a longer-term vision for a unified merchant servicing experience and future customer self-service pathways.
Result
The MVP platform established a single point of interaction for merchant origination and servicing activities, significantly reducing reliance on multiple systems and manual workarounds.
Key outcomes included:
Simplified Workflows
Bankers no longer needed to move between six separate systems to complete merchant onboarding and servicing activities. Consolidating these interactions into a unified experience reduced effort and improved consistency.
Faster Decision-Making
Processes that previously relied on manual assessment and coordination were digitised and streamlined. Approval timeframes were reduced from weeks to days, improving responsiveness for both bankers and customers.
Better Customer Visibility
Improved data synthesis and consolidated customer records provided a more complete view of merchant relationships, enabling better conversations and more informed product recommendations.
Foundation for Self-Service
The unified origination model created the foundations for future customer-facing capabilities, supporting a longer-term vision where merchants could initiate and manage services through digital channels.
Service-Led Transformation
Perhaps most importantly, the program demonstrated that meaningful transformation comes from simplifying services, not just replacing technology. By understanding the needs of both employees and customers, the initiative delivered improvements that extended beyond operational efficiency alone.
Summary
Large transformation programs are often framed as technology modernisation initiatives, yet technology is rarely the root cause of complexity. More often, complexity accumulates through years of process optimisation, organisational change and system growth.
This engagement demonstrated how service design can help untangle that complexity. By understanding the service as an interconnected system and designing around real user needs, it was possible to improve employee efficiency, reduce customer waiting times and create a platform capable of supporting future growth. The result was not simply a new system, but a more coherent service experience for everyone involved.