Published on the 27/11/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Turning regulation and connectivity into strategic advantage…

Compliance can often be seen as the enemy of innovation, but Teachers Mutual Bank is challenging that perception, flipping that script and using compliance to power its digital transformation.

“Compliance is an enabler,” says Anureet Bal, Teachers Mutual Bank Limited (TMBL) head of enterprise applications.

“Integration for us and for everyone in the industry is an unsung hero.”

From automated KYC (know your customer) checks to streamlined AML (anti-money laundering processes), TMBL sees regulatory requirements as an enabler for efficiency and trust.

“When we are compliant, our members trust us more, so we look at compliance in that way,” Bal told iStart.

Teachers Mutual Bank Limited is one of Australia’s largest customer-owned, or mutual, banks. With more than 220,000 members across its four brands, along with 600 employees and over AU$11 billion in assets, TMBL operates in a highly regulate environment where trust and security are paramount.

Like many banks, TMBL faced legacy systems and manual processes that made compliance slow and resource-heavy. KYC checks and customer risk assessments (CRA) were particularly cumbersome.

Pre-integration and automation, KYC and CRA were very manual processes – “Manual processes do take time”, notes Bal. In the case of KYC and CRA, those processes required the member to front up and fill in forms, which then took days to be process.

TMBL harnessed Boomi to enable the bank’s RPA toolsets to automate KYC workflows, fraud detection and exception handling, reducing compliance risk and freeing staff to focus on higher value work.

Bal says while regulatory pressure is only increasing, the organisation didn’t want to treat compliance as ‘just another checkbox’.

“By embedding identity verification and fraud checks into a real-time, event-driven system, we’re not just reacting faster, we’re creating a digital foundation that can evolve with member needs and the future of financial services.”

The impact has been significant with manual intervention gone and KYC results and CR assessments that once took days now coming back within minutes.

“Members fill the form in and it’s pushed through an integrator, Boomi, into a third party which performs all the checks and the KYC results and CR assessments come back within minutes.”

The efficiency allows employees to focus on member service, rather than repetitive tasks.

“It’s given our staff more time to focus on more value-added services, rather than spending time on these tasks that could easily be automated and made more efficient.”

Integration: Banking’s unsung hero

Bal says integration and APIs, alongside a move to the cloud and automation, are linchpins in the mutual bank’s KYC project and broader digital strategy.

“Integration for us and for everyone in the industry is an unsung hero,” she says.

“We want to leverage APIs to build a more scalable system and are working with existing partners from core banking to leverage some APIs to do that.”

The importance of a consolidating and bringing all technologies together into a connected ecosystem was a key learning from the AML and KYC project, where integration was a key enabler.

While cloud migration and automation grab headlines, its integration and APIs which are powering the transformation, providing the seamless connectivity required for innovation.

“We always had siloed systems not talking to each other. By using an API we can connect systems together and create a more connected ecosystem, which is flexible so we can scale whenever we need and personalise. And a key one is it can allow us to bring together data and functionality across systems.”

TMBL has used Boomi to unify its legacy infrastructure, integrating core banking, ERP and third-party systems into a real-time, data environment. That has enabled members to update details across online, branch and call centre channels in under 60 seconds instead of the previous three days – and manual intervention – required.

“That kind of responsiveness wasn’t possible before real-time integration and data orchestration became the norm for us,” Bal says.

API services were implemented to create a single source of truth for customer data, with Boomi API Management to enable secure, scalable integration between banking systems and digital channels.

On the automation front, Bal says she believes there are a lot of waste processes within technology which are ripe for automation.

“Our strategy is to identify those opportunities within the team where we have those monotonous tasks or daily tasks where we can leverage automation.”

Cloudy with a chance of resilience

As part of a push for greater resilience, TMBL is moving to the cloud. It’s already migrated to Genesis cloud, with Bal noting that the quality of service provided to members can be elevated if call times and systems used are better suited – hence the move to Genesis.

The organisation is currently around 50 percent into a lift and shift of applications to a MCS cloud – a process only started a few months ago. The ultimate goal, however – “a 2027 project” – is to move everything into the cloud and have SaaS applications wherever possible.

So far, the project has been ‘pretty seamless”.

“The only challenge, and it’s a consistent one across industry, is understanding your existing environment and seeing what the best solution is for you because it’s not one size fits all.

“We had some legacy and siloed systems and it was a case of ‘how do we bring them together and move to cloud?’. But once we got our head around that, it was pretty seamless.”

Core banking systems, she notes, are ‘very, very critical’, making lifting and shifting that infrastructure out of your own data centres and into another facility ‘something that makes us a bit nervous’.

While integration and cloud are high on Bal’s radar, she’s not quite so enthused about AI.

“We understand the importance of AI, but we do not think AI is going to take everybody’s jobs. It’s not something that is going to replace the emotional quotient that humans bring into a job.”

While the bank is looking closely at the technology, it’s still assessing area where AI can add real value.

Bal believes this will largely be in areas such as the mundane tasks the legal team perform, or in areas requiring analysis of large documents, such as vendor management functions.

Ultimately, Bal says TMBL’s transformation isn’t just about technology.

“Members and customers should be the heart of every innovation you do, and you should always see compliance as an enabler and never, ever see it as a barrier to any innovation within the bank.”