How ANZ Bank accelerated home loan origination with Temporal

The challenge: building a digital-first, cloud-native home loan origination system

Like most financial services organizations, ANZ, one of the largest banks in Australia and New Zealand, is building customer-friendly digital banking applications. They’ve rebuilt many of their services from the ground up for this initiative, and rolled out ANZ Plus, an app that lets customers track expenses, manage money, and talk to experts.

As part of this project, ANZ needed to let customers refinance home loans entirely in the app. However, from an architectural and engineering perspective, this initiative was challenging:

• Over 440 possible steps due to the unique requirements of each borrower
• Complex compensations and state management
• A combination of human-in-the loop and automated tasks
• An inherited workflow engine that slowed down innovation

These issues are typical of what engineers face when rearchitecting and rebuilding legacy systems — complexity and tools that don’t align to modern requirements. The project was mired in pitfalls, and after 18 months working on it, the team realized they needed a new approach.

Owning a home is one of the biggest financial commitments most people will make in their lifetime. We believe the process should help customers to find the right loan for them, as easy and fast as possible.

The solution: a code-first workflow orchestration tool

In building digital-first banking services, engineering teams often must adopt solutions that allow them to streamline complicated workflows and reduce manual overhead. This need is what prompted an engineer on the ANZ team to seek out a new tool and discover Temporal, a code-first workflow orchestration tool, enabling agile, scalable solutions.

He started to model one of the workflows that had been challenging for his team, and immediately understood how Temporal could dramatically improve their efficiency and simplify their overall system.

The team spent some time evaluating Temporal, and they decided to move forward with it, as it solved critical challenges within their project:

• Abstraction of error-handling logic, so engineers can focus on writing business logic
• Automatic handling of compensations and state management, so all processes are done in the correct order and will be completed or rolled back
• Straightforward integrations with third-party APIs that manage human-in-the-loop interactions (e.g., Salesforce), with configurable retry policies that prevent timeouts
• Strong security, compliance, and transparency

Temporal ensures our processes are done in the correct order and are durable. It will eventually be completed or rolled back, ensuring the state is consistent and we are compliant.

The results: 8x faster project delivery & domain-driven design

With Temporal, ANZ completed their home loan origination system in weeks, compared to the years-long effort before adopting the new tool.

Temporal has also enabled ANZ to embrace a domain-driven design. The loan system has been broken out into explicit domains (information collection, credit rating, etc.), each of which maps to a Temporal Workflow that manages state and failure logic. With this domain-driven design, the services have become composable into other solutions.

Engineers can focus more on the business logic, can communicate better with the business team, and can deliver new features and functionality faster to improve the customer experience. The system is more scalable and maintainable.

Today, millions of customers can log into their ANZ Plus app, click the “loans” icon, and complete a paperless loan application in a matter of minutes.

Do we really need to be experts in a Temporal Control Plane? Where we’re going to lead the market…is by building amazing workflows that can power digital propositions. And so for us, it was a no-brainer to choose Temporal Cloud.

Temporal Cloud: simpler, quicker, and more resilient

Many organizations initially start with a self-hosted instance of the Temporal Service, and ANZ is no exception. However, the team soon recognized there was no leverage in becoming control plane experts and made an early transition to Temporal Cloud. The switch proved to be simpler, quicker, and more resilient compared to their self-hosted setup. Upon careful evaluation of costs, they found that the costs model made more sense and this move enabled them to ultimately deliver more Workflows, faster.

What's next: a digital-first future with Temporal

Temporal empowers engineers to build complex systems with ease. It offers a reliable, code-first approach to managing workflows that results in faster project delivery.

After the success of ANZ’s home loan project, the engineering teams at the company have adopted Temporal for additional projects across the bank. Now, over 500 engineers use Temporal to build complex workflows in critical areas like payment processing, fraud detection, and know your customer (KYC) initiatives.