David Walker, Technical Director of the Westpac Group.

Westpac is creating an “evolutionary architecture” – supported by “evergreen” technology platforms – which it believes will allow the bank to be more responsive to change.

The group’s chief technical officer, David Walker, will tell at an FST financial services conference that the bank hopes to create a “state of constant transformation”, instead of pursuing technological transformations with set start and end dates.

It does this by deconstructing large – “monolithic” – software systems that it uses to perform a number of operations and replacing them with applications that assemble a number of smaller components.

Walker characterizes this architecturally as a passage from “rocks to pebbles”.

“We break things down into components,” Walker said.

“This is where the story ‘from the rocks to the pebbles’ comes from.

“We have a number of things we’re doing on this front, like our APIs, our microservices, [and] our micro-frontends.

Walker said the bank has built a collection of more than 1,000 APIs and microservices, which can be discovered by other development teams for reuse through the bank’s central development environment.

He used the TSP presentation to reveal that the bank had already achieved a “3x component reuse factor” in July of this year.

Developer productivity had doubled since the bank began to develop its “evolutionary architecture” and encourage component reuse; teams have performed 800 product updates over the past year.

“We’re getting about three times the reuse of our microservices and that’s reasonably good. Some are in the multiples and some are a little less, but an average of three is a pretty good result, ”said Walker.

The bank is now focused on developing a series of “micro-interfaces” to power small but repeatable aspects of the user experience.

“Our micro-frontends are the next thing [to develop]”said Walker.

“These are things that create small journeys, like checking my balance, or making a payment or a connection, and we build them so that they can actually work not only on several different client applications, but also [across] employee applications.

“We have already built three or four and we continue to build more. We can see the reuse really, really come with these.

The “scalable architecture” is based on “scalable” technology platforms, which require little continuous change or intervention from an operations perspective.

“Evergreen is much more about the technological components themselves. We need to introduce self-stabilizing and self-sustaining technology, ”Walker said.

“We are now in a situation where we have modern technologies that we can buy through cloud providers, we can integrate them ourselves and we can keep them as ‘evergreen’ things that support and run. of themselves, and we can apply patches universally to them, and so on.

The combination of scalable architecture and scalable systems should enable the bank to become ‘built for change’.

“As we move towards this state, we bring the organization to a point where it is able to be nimble and responsive to customers’ [needs]”said Walker.

“For me, this is the state of constant transformation that we are heading into to respond to these faster cycles. [of change]. “