ANZ will bring financial planning to retail shop fronts as part of a pilot program to showcase its range of advice options.
The bank opened its first Grow Centre in Pitt Street in Sydney yesterday and has staffed it with ANZ employees qualified to provide limited and full advice.
ANZ Global Wealth chief executive Joyce Phillips said ANZ has 450 planners within its financial planning businesses and the Grow Centre would "create a touch point on the financial planning journey".
The Grow Centre would offer basic help for ANZ customers who wanted to access their investments, insurance and superannuation online as well as providing low level simple advice. More sophisticated advice matters would be dealt with by a planner within the centre or referred to an ANZ planner within its advice network.
Joyce said the retail outlet was designed "as a destination so they would not be appearing on every street corner" and were similar to Apple stores where people could make inquiries or receive advice about particular needs".
The Grow Centre was part of wider moves within ANZ to expand its advice capabilities with the bank working with IBM and its supercomputer Watson to accelerate the creation of Statements of Advice (SOA).
Joyce said this work, labelled the Advice Transformation Program would shorten the SOA creation process from a weeks to a single session.
"ANZ will be the first organisation in the world of financial planning and insurance to use Watson to create consistent rules and processes around the provision of advice," Joyce said.
"We propose using Watson initially to tackle underinsurance and then move to financial planning advice and over time extend its capabilities to consumers, and could see the day when Watson could give advice."
