The Commonwealth Bank's retail CIO Pete Steel will soon take over as the bank's head of digital after Lisa Frazier departed the organisation last week.
iTnews understands Frazier has returned to the United States for family reasons.
Steel has been officially promoted into the role and will commence when he returns from leave on July 13.
Frazier was named as what is effectively CBA's chief digital officer two years ago. Prior to that, she had been the bank's chief innovation officer for equities and margin lending, responsible for the creation of the online wealth self-management hub MyWealth.
During her two years as head of digital - a role which encompasses the entire group's digital assets - Frazier helped develop the CommBank online and mobile banking products, its innovation lab, and Apple Watch application, among other things.
She also pioneered the use of agile software development.
Steel is a veteran of the Commonwealth Bank. Prior to his most recent stint as its retail and business bank CIO, Steel spent almost nine years as a general manager leading architecture teams and a period as the CIO of CommSec.
Two of his more recent projects included the launch of a banking app tailor-made for tablets and a hackathon in partnership with Telstra that aimed to solve headaches in property buying.
He is responsible for progressing agile and design thinking across the wider Commonwealth Bank - the company now has over 1000 people in agile scrums and more than 3500 IT and ops staff trained in design thinking.
Steel will now look after digital services for CBA's consumer, small business and wealth offerings, which includes NetBank and various CBA mobile applications.
