By Freya Purnell
Customers of the Commonwealth Bank are already seeing the benefits of its massive SAP implementation, executives said in a briefing on the core banking modernisation project.
The five-year project, which has now passed its halfway point according to CBA CIO Michael Harte, will cost the bank $1.1 billion – a figure upgraded at its recent half-yearly result by around 30 per cent.
Harte said that this increase in investment was justified on the basis of the results being gained from the project.
In a progress report on the implementation, Harte said that over 53 customer records, 1.2 million term deposit accounts, and 10 million retail deposit and transaction accounts has been migrated to SAP, delivering the benefits of real-time banking functionality, with processing occurring seven days a week.
Staff have also benefited from a simplification of work activities, enabling them to focus more on meeting customer needs, he said.
CBA CEO Ralph Norris said this move had not only already had a positive effect on customer experience, as well as provided greater flexibility in terms of product and pricing, resulting in the launch of the first new product on the platform in February, the bank’s GoalSaver account.
Harte admitted that at the outset of the project, whether such a large and complex project could be successfully executed was the biggest risk, but said he believes that the list of products delivered to date indicates that this “is no longer in question”.
However, dealing with the complexity of 40 years of legacy systems, compounded by “unstructured data and undocumented applications” remains a challenge.
Questioned on the extent of the competitive advantage such a project has delivered to the CBA over its major bank counterparts in Australia and whether others could catch up quickly, program director Dave Curran said that while “buying the SAP product tomorrow is easy, putting the team together to replace 40 years of legacy systems is hard”.
