News & articles. At ConnectWeb Connectweb has a team of editors and researchers collating the most relevant information to you and your industry. All Directories' publications and sites provide a wealth of information for research or marketing, and are used by public and corporate libraries, educational institutions, government departments, corporations and SMEs across the country. You are here: Home News Access the latest company news and announcements distributed through Medianet. Banking 24/08/2026 17:02 Rabobank Australia & New Zealand announces appointment of new Chief Human Resources Officer. Rabobank Australia & New Zealand has announced the appointment of Kathryn Marler to the position of Group Executive, Chief Human Resources Officer. Ms Marler will lead the HR and Corporate Affairs functions across the bank's Australian and New Zealand operations, joining the Region Australia, New Zealand Executive Team and reporting to Caroline Oosterbaan, CEO of Rabobank Australia and Regional Manager, Australia and New Zealand. Announcing the appointment, Ms Oosterbaan said Ms Marler brought to the role "extensive People and Culture experience in complex, highly-regulated organisations, together with deep banking knowledge and a strong commitment to building high-performing, future-ready teams". "Kathryn's blend of deep banking-sector expertise and large-scale transformation experience was central to her appointment. Operating within a global cooperative structure, Rabobank sought a leader able to continue to build a People and Culture strategy consistent with the Rabobank Group, while remaining genuinely responsive to the needs of the Australian and New Zealand business," Ms Oosterbaan said. Ms Marler joins Rabobank from Westpac Banking Corporation, where she held a number of senior leadership roles shaping enterprise-wide transformation and delivering People and Culture strategy. Part of the global cooperative Rabobank Group, the world's leading specialist food and agribusiness bank, Rabobank Australia & New Zealand is one of the region's leading agricultural banks and a major provider of corporate and business banking services to the Australian and New Zealand food and agribusiness sectors. Rabobank also provides online retail savings and deposits in the Australian and New Zealand markets. Ms Marler said she "is excited to join Rabobank at such an important time for the bank and the sector it serves". "Rabobank's cooperative culture, and its deep, long-term commitment to Australian and New Zealand farmers and food producers, is something I've long admired. I'm looking forward to partnering with Caroline and the leadership team to build the workforce capability that will carry that mission forward," she said. Ms Marler commences in the role, subject to regulatory approval, on October 6. Media contacts: Denise Shaw Will Banks Media Relations Media Relations Rabobank Australia & New Zealand Rabobank Australia Phone: 02 8115 2744 or 0439 603 525 Phone: 0418 216 103 Rabobank Australia & New Zealand Group is a part of the international Rabobank Group, the world's leading specialist in food and agribusiness banking. Rabobank has more than 125 years' experience providing customised banking and finance solutions to businesses involved in all aspects of food and agribusiness. Rabobank is structured as a cooperative and operates in 35 countries, servicing the needs of more than nine million clients worldwide through a network of more than 1000 offices and branches. Rabobank Australia & New Zealand Group is one of Australasia's leading agricultural lenders and a significant provider of business and corporate banking and financial services to the region's food and agribusiness sector. The bank has 87 branches throughout Australia and New Zealand. ConnectWeb. ConnectWeb is Australia's leading publisher of biographical data, directories and specialist newsletters. With ConnectWeb you gain access to its comprehensive database of contacts and companies in media, government and associations. Connect with Connectweb.

Westpac Banking Corp purchased a new stake in shares of The Kroger Co. (NYSE:KR – Free Report) during the 2nd quarter, according to its most recent Form 13F filing with the SEC. The institutional investor purchased 58,083 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $3,225,000. Several other large investors also recently modified their holdings […]

Snowflake, Westpac, NSW Health showcase how trusted data is turning AI into business outcomes. 21 Aug 2026 7 mins The market is entering a new phase where trusted data, rather than AI models, will determine AI business value success. The race to build the "agentic enterprise" is creating a major new opportunity for partners, with Snowflake revealing that customers are increasingly investing in the data, governance and infrastructure foundations needed to deploy AI at scale. At its World Tour in Sydney, Snowflake said the market is entering a new phase where trusted data, rather than AI models alone, will determine which organisations successfully translate AI into business value. Snowflake CIO Mike Blandina highlighted growing demand for data modernisation, governance and AI integration services, citing projects at Westpac and NSW Health as examples of how organisations are turning AI ambitions into operational outcomes. Blandina also took the opportunity to articulate its vision for the 'agentic enterprise' stating that the next phase of enterprise AI will be defined not by large language models alone, but by how organisations connect trusted data, governance, applications and AI agents. "The biggest myth is deploying your AI agents, and the data will figure itself out," Blandina told attendees. "Deploying agents does not equal the agentic enterprise." Blandina outlined four pillars underpinning Snowflake's strategy: model choice; software and application connectivity; data and business context; and an agentic control plane. Central to the strategy is Snowflake's Horizon Catalog, which provides metadata, governance and business context across enterprise environments, allowing AI systems to interpret data consistently and avoid conflicting outputs. Blandina pointed out that poorly governed data remains the biggest obstacle to AI adoption, citing customer feedback indicating most organisations still do not consider their data estates AI-ready. "There's just no good AI strategy without a great data strategy," he said. Snowflake has also expanded support for multiple AI models, allowing customers to choose between proprietary and open-weight models while introducing governance and cost controls at the workload level. The intelligence era. Westpac chief digital, data and AI officer Andrew McMullan detailed how the bank has consolidated data from 285 source systems into a unified intelligence layer built in partnership with Snowflake, accelerating model development fivefold and customer insight activation sixfold. He revealed that 95 per cent of its 35,000 employees actively use AI tools as part of their everyday work as the bank races to build what it calls an "intelligence era" operating model. The results are already flowing into frontline banking operations, according to McMullan, who described AI as a tool for empowering employees rather than replacing them. "In the last month alone, 95 per cent of our employees are actively using AI tools as part of their day-to-day work," he said. The bank has also launched internal AI agents designed to dramatically cut time spent gathering information. A tool called "Start Your Day Informed" analyses thousands of overnight signals and presents bankers with only the information requiring attention, enabling relationship managers to spend more time engaging with customers and less time preparing for meetings. Westpac's presentation underscored a broader theme running through the event: the industry's shift from AI pilots and proofs of concept to production-grade deployments built on governance, security and trusted data foundations. For McMullan, trust remains the critical differentiator. Westpac has developed a framework centred on five pillars: transparency, responsibility, purpose, security, privacy and trusted intelligence. "Trust isn't something that you build or audit later into a system; it has to be designed from the very start," he said. The bank's "Westpac Intelligence" platform now combines data, analytics, machine learning, decisioning and AI into a single enterprise layer designed to surface actionable insights while maintaining governance controls and human oversight. The initiative is also helping accelerate fraud detection efforts. McMullan said processes that once required three to six months of analysis can now be completed in hours by rapidly identifying behavioural indicators such as new payees, unusual transaction patterns and unfamiliar devices. Importantly, he stressed that AI remains advisory. "A machine learning model doesn't prevent fraud. What it does is it gives you the indicator. Our responsibility is what we do next," he said. NSW Health tackles complexity with FinBot. Snowflake showcased how public sector organisations are beginning to operationalise AI. NSW Health chief financial officer Alfa D'Amato outlined the development of FinBot, an AI-powered decision support tool designed to help finance and operational leaders navigate one of Australia's most complex healthcare systems. With more than $40 billion in annual expenditure, 226 hospitals and over 180,000 employees, the health system generates significant volumes of operational and financial data. D'Amato said FinBot enables leaders to move from questions to answers in seconds instead of weeks by combining finance, workforce, costing and performance data into a unified decision-making environment. "The answer is not producing more reports," he said. "The answer is transforming information into knowledge and knowledge into action." The system can benchmark performance, identify cost-saving opportunities and recommend actions based on evidence and operational context, while maintaining extensive governance and validation controls. "AI supports decisions. Humans remain accountable for them," he said. AWS and Snowflake double down on partner-led AI growth. Snowflake A/NZ regional vice president partners and alliances Cathy Conroy and AWS A/NZ partner lead Pip Gilbert positioned the vendor's recent alliance as a key enabler of enterprise AI projects moving from experimentation to production. The two companies' expanded strategic collaboration agreement (SCA), announced in May, includes a US$6 billion infrastructure commitment from Snowflake to AWS over five years and deeper integration around generative AI, agentic AI, AWS Marketplace and joint go-to-market programs. The agreement also expands investment in customer success initiatives, workload migrations and industry-specific solutions designed to accelerate enterprise AI deployment. Conroy described the SCA as "a significant step forward" that will help customers and partners accelerate adoption of agentic AI while helping organisations move from pilots to enterprise-scale deployments. Gilbert added the partnership extends well beyond the headline investment figure. "There are 28 different technological integrations between our services," she said, noting that the alliance spans both horizontal AI capabilities and industry-specific solutions. The executives said that enterprise AI adoption is creating a new wave of modernisation projects as customers revisit ageing data estates that previously proved too costly or complex to transform. According to Gilbert, AWS funding programs and migration initiatives are helping reduce what she described as the "cost of change", creating fresh growth opportunities for channel partners looking to build data modernisation, analytics and AI practices. AWS recently expanded its infrastructure footprint across Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) following the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region, which opened in September 2025 with three Availability Zones and local data residency capabilities. AWS has committed approximately NZ$7.5 billion to the region, which it expects will contribute NZ$10.8 billion to New Zealand's GDP and support around 1,000 jobs annually. The New Zealand region has become increasingly important for partners targeting regulated industries, enabling local customers to keep workloads and data within New Zealand while accessing AWS AI and cloud services with lower latency. Gilbert described partner ecosystems as central to AWS' growth strategy and that customers are increasingly willing to modernise ageing data environments as AI initiatives move higher on executive agendas. "The path to business value is far smoother," she said. Conroy added that partners able to adapt their go-to-market approaches around data and AI will be best positioned to capitalise on the opportunity ahead. "We are absolutely transforming the way customers operate their day-to-day business," she said. Don't miss a thing From its editors straight to your inbox. Get started by entering your email address below. Editor ARN | Reseller News With years of experience covering the latest technology trends and business news across the IT channel, Julia Talevski has been keeping the IT industry connected in Australia and New Zealand. She is currently the editor for ARN and Reseller News, responsible for keeping the community engaged at every touch point through its newsletters, websites and main events such as EDGE, WIICTA and Innovation Awards.