Bendigo Bank supports customer growth with Optimizely

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is one of Australia's biggest banks. The Bank supports more than 1.9 million customers in over 500 locations Australia-wide offering financial products including savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and insurance.

The Bank’s determined commitment to customers and their communities dates back more than 160 years and has differentiated it amongst other banking alternatives.

Each one of the communities its serves has its own unique needs and priorities. As a retail bank supporting families and businesses across Australia, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank strives to make each community prosper.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank was eager to provide a digital-first environment for its customers that would set the Bank apart from competitors and make for a better banking experience.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank embarked to replace its legacy content management system with a superior digital experience platform that would evolve its online presence in-line with the new brand for its retail arm, Bendigo Bank brand. The Bank was keen to reduce its backend operational complexity that had prevented it from realising its full digital potential.
Modern APIs shared with other services/systems within the Bank’s digital ecosystem were imperative to a successful digital estate along with an in-built personalization and customer insights engine. The Bank undertook a stringent discovery exercise to evaluate the market.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank selected Optimizely’s Content Cloud as its new DXP. The best-in-class CMS enables the team to produce customer-centric experiences for each online visitor. The first eight websites of the Bank’s digital estate were live on Optimizely in just 9-months demonstrating a rapid launch to market of this type and scale. Taking advantage of Optimizely’s all-in-one platform, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank now has a single instance to easily share and reuse content between all sites, removing previous inefficiencies. The Optimizely cloud platform adheres to ISO 027001 – as well as other security protocols that needed to be satisfied. The refresh, contemporary style now matches its modern banking capability and supports it commitment to delivering an excellent experience for its customers. The website design complements the product range and reflects the forward-thinking direction the Bank is taking.

With a vision to be Australia’s bank of choice, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank wanted to ensure its website experience could support is strategic imperatives to reduce complexity and invest in capability. The new digital experience platform enables those who operate it a host of new capabilities to quickly create new pages and learn about their visitors. The team use centralised templates to enable rapid delivery across its digital estate of now 11 websites. The Bank noted how easy it is to get to grips with the interface.

According to Cale Maxwell, the COO of LEVO, a key partner on the project, the capability of Optimizely made the transformation possible. We were able to significantly improve the way the bank managed its content, in turn creating a richer customer experience.

In January 2020, the Victorian Government partnered with Bendigo Bank and The Salvation Army to establish Victorian Bushfire Appeal, with 100% of donated funds going directly to communities in need. The appeal was conducted by the Bank’s charitable arm, Community Enterprise Foundation™ which is a site hosted on Optimizely. The appeal raised more than $46 million from 145,000 generous donors to help those impacted by the devastating Black Summer bushfires. In the first two weeks of 2020, the Community Enterprise Foundation™ website experienced more than a 45,000% increase in people visiting the website to donate. The website automatically scaled up when the additional capacity was needed as it sits on the Optimizely cloud infrastructure powered by Microsoft Azure.