BoQ appoints chief operating officer

Bank of Queensland has appointed its chief financial officer, Ram Kangatharan, to the newly created role of chief operating officer in an effort to better control costs, including IT.

The change means CIO, Jim Stabback, will now report directly to Kangatharan, as the bank also moves to consolidate gains made under its Project Pathways program and continue making incremental quality improvements, a Bank of Queensland spokesperson said.

Kangatharan has a directive to achieve a cost-to-income ratio of 45 per cent by 2011. No changes will be made to current IT projects as a result of the appointment of Kangatharan, however, according to the bank.

“The bank is committed to upgrading its teller and customer service components of our existing Fiserv core banking platform in the next 18 months,” the spokesperson said. “In addition, we will continue to selectively invest in platforms that support the bank driving efficiency and high quality customer centric service delivery enabling the vision to be the real alternative in banking in Australia.”

The Project Pathways program has enabled the bank to reduce its cost-to-income ratio to 49.9 per cent, the spokesperson said.

“While there we no specific IT projects, our IT team helped drive cost efficiencies across the organisation, for example in the better management and optimisation of demand for IT infrastructure and services,” the spokesperson said.

“[IT] also worked with the business to focus on growing our share of the SME market, improving our cross-sell capability and enhancing product offerings in selected segments.”

The bank has also completed a review of its IT outsourcing partnerships and will continue to work with HP — formerly EDS — to update and refresh several facets of its IT Services Agreement.

“The improvements will be enabled by significant changes to how we measure and manage performance, together with some important investments in underlying systems and capability,” the spokesperson said.

Bank of Queensland re-signed Telstra to deliver a three extra years of telecommunications services in July last year.

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