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Best digital experience in Australia, bar none: Commonwealth Bank CEO's promise

Matt Comyn said his bank is planning to send almost all of its applications to an 'integrated cloud installation'.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor
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CEO Matt Comyn

Image: Commonwealth Bank of Australia

Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) CEO Matt Comyn has shared his vision for the yellow bank, one that provides the best digital experience to customers.

Speaking with media on Tuesday, Comyn discussed what he called the six "key elements" to his bank's technology strategy, with the first focused on evolving CBA's digital presence from both Netbank and the CommBank app into a personalised experience.

"That's enabled us, combining our customer engagement engine with the app, to deliver 6.4 billion personalised messages," he said. "Overall, we're working increasingly with a number of different partners to try and bring best in class digital experience."

See also: How CommBank is training its machine learning Customer Engagement Engine

"Our strategy more broadly is really to be the most relevant and trusted partner for our customers at the centre of their financial lives," Comyn continued.

"Being able to deliver the best digital experience; our aspiration again is to be the best digital experience in Australia, bar none."

Comyn was speaking at the launch of Backr, which is touted by the bank's venture arm, X15 Ventures, as an app that helps small business owners launch new "digitally-enabled businesses to support economic recovery".

Although there's a focus on innovating internally, Comyn said CBA is also looking for different parts of the community to work with to "scale some of that innovation". He said that was part of the rationale for standing up X15 Ventures.

"We continue to make investments in and around digitisation," he said. "It's going to be incredibly important just to make the customer experience better and faster."

One example the CEO shared was a plan to send the majority of CBA's apps to the cloud.

"We've talked about the importance of both simplifying our technology and making sure that we've got the most resilient and high availability systems," he said. 

"Part of that, over a multi-year effort, we'll be putting almost all of our current applications into the most modern and integrated cloud installation, and as a big part of that … we have to work with the best people and some of that's about partnering with particular firms, but it's also about making sure we're attracting, developing, and retaining some of the finest engineering talent in the country."

Comyn said the CommBank app has been central to the bank's digital strategy, explaining that around half a million active customers have been brought into the app over the last six or so months.

See also: CommBank App 4.0 boasts location-based tracking and tax return notifications

"We're seeing almost 7.5 million digitally active customers; we get about 6.3 million log-ins per day into the app; more than a billion dollars of transactions now flowing through the app. We saw at the peak of COVID a daily log-in across the CommBank app and Netbank just over 10 million," he said.

"10 million daily log-ins, which I think would hold us as obviously one of the most highly used applications in the Australian landscape."

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