CBA's dated IT systems forced its hand, says ANZ

Renai LeMay
Monday, 18 July 2011 16:48

IT Industry - Strategy

ANZ is the only major bank in Australia to have consistently rejected the need for core banking modernisation over the past few years.

The most high-profile project in the space is CommBank's gargantuan $1.1 billion core overhaul, conducted over the past three years in coalition with technology partners SAP and Accenture. However, NAB's own Oracle-based project is currently gaining a full head of steam, and even Westpac has long-term plans to tackle its core platform, using learnings gleaned from its acquisition of St George, which already operates a relatively modern system.

In March, CommBank CIO Michael Harte and other CBA leaders conducted a briefing on their overhaul in which they repeatedly emphasised that the project had put the bank between two and five years ahead of its rivals, allowing real-time transaction functionality and the speedy deployment of new financial products. However, the initiative has also proven costly. The cost of the CommBank overhaul was initially pegged in 2008 at $580 million. Since that stage it has since received several additional cash injections '” with its budget rising by $150 million following its acquisition of BankWest, and then by a further $370 million in February this year.

Last week, in her first broad public briefing since taking the job as ANZ CIO in November 2009, Weatherston said CommBank was only investing so heavily in the project because it had to.

ANZ had upgraded much of its platform in the 1990'²s, the CIO said, particularly building what she described as an 'embryonic integration layer' on top of its systems which is still used as an interface between high-level systems and the bank's underlying core banking architecture. That layer, Weatherston said, was 'still very usable', in terms of integrating channels and customer applications into ANZ's offerings.