Inside Macquarie Bank's big digital ambitions

Macquarie Bank is hoping to differentiate itself from rivals in the fiercely competitive digital banking space by using machine learning and natural language processing tools to give its customers detailed insight into their finances. The bank last week unveiled its new online and mobile banking platform for personal banking customers, a vastly significant upgrade from the online-only platform customers have been using to date. It's quite a few years late to market with such an offering, but decided to forego the competitive advantage that comes with being a first mover to wait until the stars aligned with its core banking overhaul and until it could deliver what it considers a truly differentiating offer. In designing the new platform - which consists of native iOS and Android apps and a website - the bank said it looked to customer experiences delivered by the likes of Netflix, Facebook and Spotify to create an offering that would compete with "the last app a customer used". As a result, Macquarie Bank personal banking customers can now use tools underpinned by machine learning and natural language processing technologies to tag and track transactions, automatically categorise spending, and "search-how-you-speak", among other things.