ANZ is currently the only bank in Australia/New Zealand to actually operate a complete IT set-up to support the bank's IT initiatives. The India center with close to 90 engineers is looking at scaling up to house close to 300 engineers by early next year and is looking at being a 400 people set-up by 2001.

Speaking at a briefing, ANZ CIO David Boyles said the e-transformation was aimed at enabling all the services offered by the bank to customers to be personalised and facilitated over a number of channels through seamless channel integration and CRM technology.

``The bank, following the extensive work on integrating an IT enabling processes, has moved from functioning on multi-core banking platforms to a few specific core platforms. The Internet banking services have also been rolled out,'' Mr Boyles said.

The key driver behind the initiative was to turn around the day-to-day operations to function on a connected, online and real time environment using IP (Internet protocol), he said.

Through its IT initiatives, the bank had actually reduced its cost vs income ratio to 51.7 cents for a dollar of revenue as against 63.1 cents for a dollar of revenue in 1997, Mr Boyles added.