Diversity driving creativity and ingenuity at Westpac’s tech hub

Marina Gainulina
09:30am December 09 2025

Software engineer Hannah McDonald, pictured at the Westpac Tech Hub on Queensland’s Gold Coast, says the company nurtures innovation: “There’s so much room for us to come to work and bring ideas and be rewarded for doing so."

When Paul Bari set out to recruit another 30 software engineers for Westpac’s technical hub on the Gold Coast, he had a clear idea of what he was looking for.

 

“I always focus on diversity of thought. That’s what it’s all about.

 

It’s not ‘diversity’; it’s specifically diversity of thought,” says Bari, the chief information officer for Westpac’s consumer banking ­operations and its multi-year, multibillion-dollar UNITE program.

 

UNITE aims to bring all Westpac’s digital operations onto a ­single platform and create a solid foundation to incorporate emerging technologies and products such as AI and digital currencies.

 

In a world where too many companies see diversity as an ­unavoidable business cost, Bari saw opportunity.

 

He says monocultures encourage conformity, and conformity is the enemy of creative collaboration, innovative thinking and fresh solutions.

 

“Diversity of thought adds perspective, and breaks down silos and silo-thinking, and it forces collaboration, because there are no natural pockets where people can congregate,” he says.

 

There are 47 different nationalities among the 250 engineers working at the hub, and more than half the engineers hired in the recent round are women.

 

“Because everyone is different, if you create a space where people are comfortable being themselves, then they’re probably going to end up doing their best work, and they’re probably going to end up having perspectives that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.”

 

Regardless of its moral merit, diversity is good business practice, Bari says.

 

“The output is better, the product is better, and we measure higher employee engagement.”

 

For large corporations trying to implement big digital projects, the temptation is to outsource to overseas providers, but Bari says it has proved more cost-effective in both absolute and relative terms to set up on the Gold Coast.

 

“Out of the 30 engineers that we just hired, the average loaded cost to the organisation is lower than the majority of our third-party suppliers overseas,” he but the real value is in the added productivity.

 

“We have a suite of tools that measure developer productivity or engineering productivity.

 

It’s not a perfect science but we see productivity numbers on average close to three times what we get with overseas partners.”

 

Part of the reason Westpac decided four years ago to set up an engineering hub in Surfers Paradise was a ready supply of engineering graduates.

 

“I’ve got seven excellent tertiary grade institutions within a 70km radius of the hub.

 

Simply put, I’m going to hoover up all the best talent, and they’ll stay here, and that will inspire the next ­generation to build a career here,” he says.

 

“I think for Australia to be successful, the discussion has to be wider than Melbourne and Sydney.

 

We have to network our regions – without that we’re not going to get the scale [we need] and we are not going to maximise the talent pool within the country.”

 

Hannah McDonald, 25, joined the engineering hub in February.

 

Originally from Lismore, a couple of hours south, and a graduate of Southern Cross University, she says the experience has been transformative.

 

“It’s really exciting because while we go through this huge project, there are all these opportunities for us to think about how we want to innovate along the way, and Westpac is very much pushing us towards bringing up ideas and making sure we push back when things are done the way they used to be done, which I have really, really loved,” she says.

 

McDonald has industry-­agnostic skills, which means she could have gone anywhere, but she says Westpac offered things that start-ups lack – both breadth and scale.

 

“Westpac has a feeling of innovation and it feels like the ceiling is so much higher: I can work on so many varying technologies,” she says.

 

“There’s so much room for us to come to work and bring ideas and be rewarded for doing so,” McDonald says.

 

“[Westpac] wants the diversity we’re bringing to the table.

 

It doesn’t necessarily have to be ­because I’m a woman, it could be because I’m come from another country, or whatever. But what I see is that they’re looking to make sure that the opinions in the room are not homogeneous.”

 

The tech industry is notorious for its bad treatment of women.

 

A recent report found that just 29 per cent of AI-skilled workers are women.

 

McDonald says the branding of her tech courses at school felt masculine.

 

“I think we’ve really failed to market what technology can be for women,” she says.

 

“When I sit down at my desk, yes, it can have a certain appearance that can make it look like it’s maybe less interesting or more challenging, but it’s actually this very, very creative experience of designing a way out of a problem, and I think a lot of women have these skills.”

 

Bari says Westpac is working with schools and colleges to redress the balance.

 

“What we’re trying to do with the engineering hub is we are trying to attack the structural elements of why females may not be pursuing a career in STEM,” he says.

 

“The hub is – and for some time will be – about networking, about leveraging the power of the regional network when it comes to human capital.

 

We had an event at the start of this year where we had access to the top 20 female graduates who were coming out of the top tertiary institutions in Southeast Queensland, and I offered them all a job at that point.”

Marina Gainulina

Marina Gainulina is a Content Producer for Westpac Wire, with ten years of experience in marketing communications. She holds a Bachelor of Communications & Media (Journalism) degree and a drive to connect with discerning audiences via authentic storytelling across mediums. She has managed editorial and brand comms for the likes of Tiffany & Co., Hugo Boss, NIVEA and GRAZIA.

Don't miss

Related articles

Ten tech trends to watch this year

By David Walker
Westpac Group Chief Technology Officer

TECHx showcases Westpac’s tech evolution

By James Thornhill and Kalp Sanghvi

Bright young minds bring fresh thinking to future tech challenges

By Liam Cormican
Reporter

Browse topics