By Talent Market Pulse Staff
Westpac New Zealand said Wednesday it has consolidated 26 fragmented HR systems onto a single Workday HCM platform, retiring years of spreadsheets and manual workarounds in a move its Chief People Officer frames as the data foundation for skills-based planning and eventual AI adoption.
The disclosure, reported first by IT Brief New Zealand, is being positioned not as a software upgrade but as the completion of a multi-year business transformation — and, deliberately, as a precondition for anything the bank wants to do with artificial intelligence.
What "26 systems" actually looked like
Marc Figgins, who took the Chief People Officer role several years ago, described the starting point in blunt terms: "Spreadsheets, sellotape, Blu Tack, homespun apps from defunct garage projects, inconsistent data, loose rivets, knowledge held by a few key people, and a constellation of 26 disparate HR systems cobbled clumsily together, buried in a crowded intranet, and ingenious, cunning and creative workarounds."
The fragmentation created a credibility problem, not just an efficiency one. "The simple reality was our systems were actually undermining our three Cs," Figgins said, referring to the bank's people strategy pillars of culture, capability and capacity. "They created friction and confusion, they provided no meaningful insights on the workforce, and they consumed capacity and workarounds and noise. When people don't trust the data, confidence erodes quickly, and for a people function, that's a real problem."
The three rules that made it land
Westpac ran the program through a three-point operating doctrine, according to Figgins: it was a business transformation rather than an HR project, because "Workday touches every leader and every employee, so the business needs to own it"; trust was non-negotiable, meaning clean data, clear processes and transparency; and the design target was humans, with simplicity and inclusion as the standard.
The internal sell also required a hard pivot. Figgins conceded that early pitches built on employee-experience benefits "fell unsurprisingly on deaf ears" with executive peers. What worked was a risk-and-economics case: compliance, cost, data privacy, cleaner delegations and controls, time tracking, role clarity and accountability — plus a longer-term argument that a single trusted data layer is what makes skills-based workforce planning and genuine talent mobility possible at all.
That pitch survived an unusually turbulent stretch: the transformation spanned three CEOs, significant executive turnover and changes to most of the board — a durability test most HR technology programs do not pass.
The measurable payoffs so far
The bank says leaders are now saving around two hours every week through simplified processes and self-service, with more expected. Expenses, corporate purchasing cards and performance management — historically the most resented administrative chores — have been rebuilt as digitized, single-source workflows. "Leaders and teams are working from the same source of truth," Figgins said. "You can't aspire to be a high performing culture with tools from the dark ages."
Two second-order effects stand out for other HR leaders. First, pay transparency: Workday's Real Earnings Management made remuneration data broadly visible, and while Figgins acknowledged "a level of discomfort, initially on this," he said the practice "positively impacted our gender pay gap." Second, role redirection: with trusted data and simpler processes, Westpac's people team says it has shifted from administering transactions to partnering with the business on skills, roles and future capability.
Why this is the AI story, not the HR story
The consolidation matters beyond one bank because of what Figgins says comes next — and what he refuses to do first. On AI, he is openly skeptical of the market: "There's a lot of snake oil out there, there's a lot of froth. Rather than trying to apply AI to everything, companies need to be really clear-headed in identifying the problems they have that need solving, and avoid signing up to every sparkling offering."
That instinct lines up with where independent analyst research is pointing. The Josh Bersin Company's HR 2030 blueprint, unveiled in June at its Irresistible 2026 conference, projects HR departments shrinking 30 to 50 percent by 2030 as agentic AI absorbs transactional people work, and warns organizations to take an architectural approach to avoid "agent sprawl." The blueprint's agent architectures draw continuously on internal data and business rules — which means, in practice, that a function whose data lives in 26 systems and a few people's heads cannot safely delegate decisions to AI, at any scale. Westpac spent years building the trusted layer first; the analyst consensus is that AI makes that sequencing the only viable one.
Figgins arrives at the conclusion from experience rather than research: he first saw Workday's connective potential at Air New Zealand in the 2010s, where it anchored employee-experience work built on top of the airline's customer-obsessed design culture. At Westpac, the same logic now extends to learning: the bank plans to underpin its reimagined Westpac Banker Academy with Workday Learning this year.
What HR leaders should copy
Four moves travel well from this deployment. Treat the platform consolidation as a business-owned transformation with executive sponsorship that outlives any single CEO. Sell it on risk, compliance, cost and data privacy — not employee experience alone. Make data trust a non-negotiable acceptance criterion ("clean data, clear processes, transparency"), not a cleanup phase. And use transparency mechanisms like pay-band visibility as a forcing function for data quality, since nobody can defend salary ranges built on unreliable data.
The cautionary notes travel well too. Figgins was blunt about implementation reality — "If only it was plug and play. It wasn't" — citing a huge volume of complex data to wrangle and policies that had to be written, not migrated. The two-hours-a-week savings figure is the bank's own estimate, and the gender pay gap claim is his characterization rather than a published audit. Both are worth tracking as the Westpac Banker Academy expansion becomes the first major test of whether the new data layer actually converts into workforce capability.
For HR leaders watching the AI wave from a fragmented stack of their own, Westpac's message is unglamorous and clear: buy the trusted data layer before the intelligent one. The snake oil test only works if you can tell what's real.
Sources: IT Brief New Zealand (Mara Sugue, Oct. 7, 2026, with direct quotes from Westpac New Zealand Chief People Officer Marc Figgins); The Josh Bersin Company HR 2030 agentic HR blueprint, unveiled June 8, 2026 (PR Newswire release and industry coverage); Workday New Zealand program materials.