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Finance

New CommBank core now holds customer info

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia today said it had migrated all customer information onto its core banking system as it reaches the halfway point of the mammoth $730 million modernisation project.
Written by Renai LeMay, Contributor

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) today said it had migrated all customer information onto its core banking system as it reaches the halfway point of the mammoth $730 million modernisation project.

The project was initiated in April 2008 as a four-year, $580 million initiative to overhaul the bank's ageing legacy systems with the aid of Accenture and SAP. In August last year, CBA tipped another $150 million into its budget to bulk up some sub-systems, as well as extending the platform to subsidiary organisations.

The project was on track and a number of key milestones would be achieved this year, according to the bank.

"The group's largest single investment, the four-year banking modernisation, remains on schedule at its halfway stage and will achieve a number of key milestones this year, including migration of all deposit and transaction accounts to the new system," the bank said today in statements associated with its financial results for the six months to 31 December.

"All customer information migrated, three live trials underway," the bank said, boasting of "quantum improvements" in customer service and efficiency.

It said it had suffered just five incidents (believed to be IT outages or problems of some kind) in the six months to 31 December. This figure has been gradually shrinking since 2007, when the bank had 48 incidents for the full financial year.

The bank's total IT services expenses for the period shrank to $485 million from $493 million for the six months previously to June, but were still substantially up on the IT services for the six months to 31 December 2008, when they were $380 million.

The main changes in the IT expenses through December, compared with six months earlier, were a $30 million decrease in applications maintenance and development costs and a $31 million increase in the cost of amortising software assets.

Use of the bank's NetBank platform is steadily increasing, with CBA racking up an average of 36.3 monthly NetBank log-ons in the 2010 financial year so far, versus 18.5 million in the 2007 financial year.

Finally, the bank noted that it was planning to align the systems of recent acquisition Bankwest by the 2012 financial year, with full integration of Bankwest's accounts into CBA's new core banking platform to happen after FY2012.

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