CommBank has entered a five-year strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to continue as the bank's preferred cloud provider. This agreement marks the next step in CommBank's technology journey to become tomorrow's bank today for customers.
By rearchitecting a significant percentage of our workloads onto AWS, and using cloud native designs, we are further simplifying the bank's technology environment. This helps accelerate AI adoption and improves delivery of new customer experiences faster and more securely.
The agreement was central to the creation of the CommBiz Gen AI powered messaging service, designed to reimagine banking for tens of thousands of Business Banking customers. Leveraging the bank's Development Operations (DevOps) Hosting platform, as well as the Group Generative.AI Platform and Guardrails Service, the product went from idea to production in just six weeks.
This expanded collaboration with AWS reinforces CommBank's commitment to leveraging the exceptional talent of its engineers, recognising that continuous investment in their skills is critical to maintaining the bank's position at the forefront of delivering global best digital customer experiences.
CommBank Chief Technology Officer Rodrigo Castillo said: "As customer adoption of digital banking continues to grow, we're harnessing AI and cloud to deliver faster, safer and more personalised digital banking services.
"AI is enabling new experiences for customers delivered faster than before, providing a frictionless experience to build and release new AI-powered products and features for our customers in a safe, responsible way.
"To reimagine customer experiences, we need to ensure our engineers are equipped with the right tools and practices to ignite creativity and advance their already industry-leading technical skills. The skilling and certification opportunities will help our engineers continue to deliver global best experiences."
Jamie Simon, Director of Financial Services, AWS Australia and New Zealand, commented: "The CommBank and AWS relationship spans more than a decade, and we are excited to expand upon it as we support their digital transformation through this next phase of cloud adoption. Together we will simplify and standardise their technology foundations on the most secure and resilient cloud platform, enabling faster experimentation and adoption of AI and other key technologies.
"As the cloud provider of choice to some of the largest banks, insurers and financial institutions in Australia, we understand the local demands of a heavily regulated industry, for a highly secure, resilient, flexible, and scalable platform to enhance the performance and availability of their critical operations. AWS offers this, as well as a proven track record that helps them meet their regulatory obligations and delivers significant value to their millions of customers across Australia."
Delivering for customers
CommBank's development, security, and operations (DevSecOps) implementation, along with its cloud modernisation program, has seen 2x growth in its ability to deploy changes to production, helping the bank create a market-leading digital ecosystem that enables deeper customer relationships.
Cloud modernisation will further simplify the bank's technology foundations, accelerate AI adoption - which has already doubled to over 2,000 AI models in 2024 - and other innovations to improve the delivery of new customer experiences.
For Business Banking customers, the collaboration will help create a simpler digital experience through the launch of CommBiz messaging service late last year. The Gen AI messaging service will enable Business Banking customers to make payments faster and transact with confidence by extracting information from over 80 different CommBiz user guides and FAQs and other supporting pages to provide relevant information quickly using natural language. The solution leverages Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Claude 3 and Cohere LLMs, and Amazon OpenSearch as the vector database.
World-class engineering capabilities and employee skilling
AWS also provides CommBank engineers with access to tools and opportunities to enhance their cloud skills by co-creating innovative solutions, training, and certification, such as AWS Cloud Certification to drive velocity in tech innovation.
This follows the launch of CommBank's AI Factory in September 2024, powered by Amazon EC2 P5 Instances, to help accelerate AI adoption across the bank and enable engineers to safely test and develop AI solutions, leveraging increased compute power to fine-tune large AI language models at higher speeds.
CommBank's development and operations (DevOps) Hosting Platform (DHP), hosted on AWS, has also been enhanced to provide a frictionless experience to build and release new AI products and features for customers and employees in record time, whilst providing out of the box guardrails for responsible use of AI and native integration with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases for model access and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques.
Since starting its cloud journey with AWS over a decade ago, CommBank has transformed its cloud delivery by streamlining controls and removing blockers. Core platforms and applications, including Netbank, CommSec and MUREX have migrated to AWS from on-premises environments, enhancing scalability, security, and resiliency.
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