AI, lending growth, and tech investment reshape ASB banking
ASB is rapidly rolling out artificial intelligence across the bank, with CEO Vittoria Shortt making it clear this is now a core productivity and customer‑experience play, not a side experiment.
Shortt says ASB is looking to “leverage as much as we possibly can” from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia group, which is “being very proactive and understanding both the opportunities and the risks with AI.”
She describes AI as a way to gain “scale benefit” across teams – from engineers and developers through to the contact centre and customer due diligence functions – so staff can focus more on judgement and relationships, and less on repetitive work, interest.co.nz reported.
That AI drive sits alongside solid financial momentum. For the six months to 31 December, ASB reported cash net profit after tax of $719 million, up 1% on the prior period, as home lending rose 8%, business and rural lending 4%, and customer deposits 5%.
Developers “never going to write code from scratch again”
One of the biggest shifts is in ASB’s large tech workforce. Shortt says the bank has “about a thousand of those writing code. They're never going to write code from scratch again. They are using these new AI tools and they're working extremely well.”
According to the ASB chief, this has already halved ASB’s development cycle time and is helping the bank migrate from legacy systems to modern platforms.
“We're using AI tools and capability to help us translate code,” Shortt said.
AI in the contact centre and risk checks
AI is also reshaping how ASB handles customer calls.
The bank’s new contact centre platform “has AI capability,” Shortt says, and it is “helping pop information to our people on the phones...making the calls more efficient.”
That upgrade has already cut average pick‑up times from four minutes to two, critical when customers are waiting on lending decisions, refixes, or hardship support.
On the risk side, ASB is using AI for customer due diligence in areas such as anti‑money laundering and know‑your‑customer checks, potentially reducing friction in the onboarding and verification stages of a mortgage journey.
Bringing AI into every ASB job and into customers’ businesses
Shortt’s ambition is bank‑wide: “We are moving to make sure that everybody at ASB has access to an [AI] tool. We want everybody to start learning where it works, where it doesn't work, and how it can help all of our jobs.”
ASB is also exporting that AI expertise into the real economy, piloting a programme “putting masters and doctorate students into our customers' businesses to help apply AI.”
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