[News] Westpac NZ Wins Two International Awards for the App Challenge
Westpac New Zealand’s innovative crowdsourcing competition, The Westpac App Challenge, has won two prestigious international awards.
The United States PR Daily Awards attracted close to 350 entries from around the world and the App Challenge was selected as the winner for Best Mobile Strategy. In Hong Kong, at the PR Asia Awards that attracted 536 entries from 17 countries, it was selected as the Best Campaign in Australia and New Zealand. This award was particularly notable as the Westpac team, led by External Relations Manager Chris Mirams, was one of only three in-house teams to win against many of the major agencies from across the region, many of them well known globally.
Director of Corporate Affairs, Sue Foley, said the crowdsourcing concept was bold for a bank and reflected the thinking and vision within the business.
“The international acknowledgement is gratifying and we’re humbled and pleased. Chris devised the concept and the team executed it on a shoestring with the added bonus is it delivered some really fabulous apps that will help us deliver on the vision of being the leading digital bank in New Zealand,” Ms Foley said.
The Westpac App Challenge was a crowd sourcing competition that involved asking developers and designers across the country to think of a pain point as a bank customer and then use their skills to solve it with a mobile app. Three apps were chosen for development with two due for release shortly.
Westpac was the first bank in Australia, New Zealand and Asia to crowdsource mobile apps and the campaign received international coverage in mainstream and IT media. The webpage set up for the competition attracted more than 57,000 visits, tweets and conversations reached an audience of more than 350,000 and it was recalled by 195,000 customers in brand tracking.
Off the back of its success, Westpac also launched a similar concept in the United Kingdom which resulted in an app that will be industry leading on a global level and due for release soon.
