Australian banking group Westpac has appointed Damien MacRae as CEO of its nascent Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) business.
Damien MacRae, CEO of Westpac Banking-as-a-Service. Image source: Westpac
MacRae starts his tenure in this newly created role on 1 April 2022 and says he is “excited by the opportunity to keep Westpac at the front of the embedded banking trend”.
The appointment follows the departure of Cameron Meindl, who left Westpac at the end of 2021 after two and a half years as chief platform officer and 13 years at the bank. Meindl’s role included overseeing the deployment of the BaaS platform, based on the core banking system from UK-based start-up 10x Banking.
“Banking is increasingly becoming embedded in platforms and apps of non-bank businesses. Those non-bank businesses recognise that banking is an incredibly capital and regulatory intensive business, which is something they don’t wish to explore – but it’s core to Westpac and that’s what we’re leveraging through BaaS,” MacRae comments.
Built over the last two years, Westpac’s BaaS offering leverages a cloud-native banking platform, built from the ground up together with 10x, and integrates more than 30 different technology services.
Westpac’s specialist business chief Jason Yetton says the BaaS offering is underpinned by the “most modern banking architecture in Australia”, with the ability to reduce both technology and customer acquisition costs.
Among the early partners to the service, Afterpay has been the first to switch on a product, launching its spending and savings app last autumn, underpinned by Westpac. MacRae describes early take-up among Afterpay’s customers as “promising”.
Afterpay has more than 3.3 million users in Australia, so there is an opportunity for Westpac to interact with this vast customer base that might be new to the bank, he says. A lot of these customers are millennials, which is an “important audience” for Westpac, he adds.
The bank promises products from other partners to be brought to market within months, including from digital lender SocietyOne.
Westpac will also launch a fully digital mortgage product later this year.
“We’re having conversations with a range of businesses about the platform’s capabilities and how it can help them – companies from a cross section of industries, with large customer bases, predominantly within that millennial demographic market,” MacRae says.
MacRae has had a long association with Westpac, having worked with the bank previously for 12 years from 2003 in a number of senior roles across mortgages, retail and SME and premium banking.
He re-joined in June 2021, after a six-year stint with InvoCare and Experian.
He will retain his current role as managing director of Westpac’s Pacific Bank and Specialist Finance.
MacRae’s appointment follows a string of senior hires for the Westpac BaaS team, including Christopher Gale as chief commercial officer, Nicole Druce as head of technology, and Chris Baker as head of product.
