Westpac
“Can Australia's oldest bank modernise its payment and lending infrastructure fast enough to retain SMB and institutional customers against nimble fintech challengers offering embedded finance natively?”
Westpac is Australia's oldest bank, operating for over 200 years as a full-service retail, business, and institutional bank. Over the last decade it has invested heavily in digital transformation — building out API-first payment products (PayWay, QuickStream), open banking infrastructure under Australia's Consumer Data Right framework, and real-time payments via NPP. Its embedded finance angle is primarily as a provider of banking infrastructure to Australian businesses (bank feeds, payment facilitation, invoice finance, super clearing) rather than as a buyer of third-party embedded finance components. The bank competes with non-bank fintechs (Stripe, Square, PayPal) in SMB payments and lending, and is building platform-like capabilities to retain business customers.