The Commonwealth Bank has reinforced its intention to focus on building its own in-house IT capabilities and reducing reliance on partnerships for IT delivery.
In its half yearly results on Wednesday, the bank announced an intention to increase the size of its 5000-strong engineering team.
It also said it would continue to digitise systems and to simplify and reduce the size of its application footprint.
CBA chief executive Matt Comyn said that while the bank will “always be leveraging partners”, certain services and systems deemed critical to CBA’s innovation agenda may now be handled in-house.
“As we've looked across our entire IT portfolio there are some elements of our other services that were previously being done by third parties which we've started to, and may continue, to insource," Comyn told iTnews.
“Adding world class [software] engineering talent enables us to both continue and to increase the level of product innovation around building distinct services and offerings for our customers.
“We know the difference that an absolutely high quality engineering team, which is empowered with the right tools and technology so that they can do their best work [can make], so it's a huge focus for myself and [CIO] Pascal Boillat."
CBA detailed one such effort at the end of last year, in the form of a container-as-a-service platform it has built on an AWS stack.
The bank is continuing a five year effort to migrate 95 percent of its workloads into public cloud as it looks to modernise its systems.
“It's a significant exercise. I'd say we're still in the phase at the moment of gathering momentum,” Comyn said.
"We meet regularly to try and examine what number of workloads we're going to move over in the next, in this case, every 30 or 60 days, but it's fair to say it's a significant undertaking given the size of our [IT] estate.”
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