Commbank digitises paper-based procedures to maintain focus

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has attributed part of its success so far to Pegasystems, which has helped reduce the bank's burden of working on trivial business processes and instead has allowed it to focus its attention on servicing its increasingly demanding customers.

Speaking at the opening of the Pegasystem's new office in Sydney today, CBA CIO Michael Harte said as the company faces the current technology disruption, it was important they got the business process framework right, which has since enabled them to refocus and repurpose how they do work.

"As a financial service goes to market, to ensure they remain relevant and are able to increase the intimacy of the interaction they have with the same personality or legacy, it can be really difficult," he said.

"But what Pega, and the likes of other IT corporations, offer is to reduce that burden on carrying that legacy and allow the recapitalisation of the existing systems by redesigning processes so they can engage with the customer more readily.

"It's a model driven approach to reduce friction and time to market, allowing for shorter cycles to allow for faster, richer quality products so the customers are not left frustrated."

While CBA is Pegasystem's longest customer of its generation software of technology in Australia, other clients such as Telstra, ANZA, PayPal, and Citibank have also seen improved results.

According to Pegasystems founder and CEO Alan Trefler, adopting its process models is about engaging, simplifying and changing the way businesses operate, particularly by taking a new model approach to software. He said the company's focus is to eliminate an irony that exists in computer technology, and to digitise a lot of business processes and procedures that remain paper-based decades after they could have been digitised.

"The idea of companies wanting to become digital is being heard increasingly and it's also being seen increasingly in the thought leadership front. But whilst strategy is key to a digital enterprise about how you want to do it, what we found is that execution demands software," he said.

"This is not about no software; this is a better way to think about software."

Harte agreed saying it's about creating a system where employees are moved to doing higher order functions and allowing machines to do all the grunt work.

"It's a very old idea to allow humans to do everything, that's why technology is designed and that's why a model driven approach helps takeaway the craft work because it's not necessary to make everything by hand," he said.