Westpac has signed a five-year partnership with Microsoft that will see the tech giant help the bank continue with the rollout of its digital and hybrid multi-cloud strategy.

Under the partnership, Westpac will adopt Microsoft Azure as it continues to expand the use of cloud-based systems, and look to bring its application, data, and AI capabilities together in a "more cohesive manner that can be scaled across the enterprise".

Westpac engineers will also receive training and education on Azure technologies through Microsoft's enterprise skilling initiative.

"We are looking to significantly scale up our use of the cloud across the bank, especially with software-as-a-service partners to help deliver more digital-to-the-core experiences for customers. This includes areas such as digital, mortgages, business lending, our banking-as-a-service platform, artificial intelligence, and data," Westpac CTO David Walker said.

"This partnership will be valuable in enhancing our real-time data and insights capabilities, building on our data-driven experiences platform which is currently being uplifted onto Azure's evergreen cloud-native data platform-as-a-service."

"The new training and development opportunities will also provide benefits in terms of upskilling and driving innovation, and help our people become future-ready."

This latest deal builds on a longstanding relationship between the two companies, which has seen Microsoft help Westpac transition its data and customer insights platforms to Azure, including its data-driven experiences platform and real-time customer insights platform.

Westpac also leverages Azure artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to process documents, starting with mortgages, with plans to expand this to other business processes across the bank's portfolio. 

Last week, the bank signalled the importance technology plays in the business, announcing a restructure that would see the company's technology support function reside in a new division called customer services and technology, which will be headed up by current COO Scott Collary. 

Westpac CEO Peter King said the restructure was to not only reduce its cost base to AU$8 million by 2024, but also improve the bank's customer service levels. 

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