Macquarie backs change initiatives with bigger slice of tech budget

Macquarie Bank spent roughly $787 million on technology dedicated to ‘changing the organisation’ in the last financial year. 

More broadly, Macquarie Group spent a total of $2.2 billion on technology in the year ended March 31 2024, a growth rate of 14 percent year-on-year.

Macquarie CFO Alex Harvey said 35 percent of that spending was allocated to “change” initiatives, noting that this “used to be a smaller proportion”.

“The important thing is, we are setting up the organisation to meet our obligations and to support the growth of the business in years to come,” Harvey said.

During the bank's earnings call, Harvey said investments spanned data and digitisation to “support our important regulatory and compliance obligations around the world”.

Alongside compliance technology, Macquarie spent more on cyber security “in relation to the threat landscape”.

The bank also saw a 50 percent increase in non-salary technology spending during FY24, according to Harvey. 

Operating technology expenses increased 12 percent from $562 million to $631 million last financial year.

According to Macquarie, this mainly reflected higher expenditure on technology platforms and infrastructure, increased compliance and regulatory spend, as well as "digitalisation and other technology initiatives”.

The group has also been investigating potential generative AI use cases and pilots and even put a call out for a director of product AI in November 2023.

Meanwhile, Macquarie’s banking division recently said it had reached the 96 percent mark for workloads running in public cloud, closing in on its 100 percent migration goal.

The banking unit, which has been talking up its data analytics evolution for some time, also unveiled its ‘Customer Intelligence Engine’.

This serves as a customer and transactional data used for personalisation and to build new customer-facing digital services, banking and financial services CIO Richard Heeley said at the time.