The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank) is expanding its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), after the two entities penned a five-year partnership for AWS to continue as the bank’s preferred cloud provider.
Through this strategic partnership, CommBank aims to move a ‘significant percentage’ of its workloads onto AWS to simplify its technology environment. CommBank hopes to accelerate AI adoption and improve the delivery of new customer experiences faster and more securely through this move.
Rodrigo Castillo, CTO at CommBank, 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.”
In 2024, the CommBank and AWS collaboration also supported the launch of the CommBiz Gen AI-powered messaging service, designed to enhance the banking experience 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 talent of its engineers, recognising that continuous investment in their skills is critical to maintaining the bank’s position at the forefront of delivering digital customer experiences.
Bolstering AI adoption
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.
Jamie Simon, director of financial services, AWS Australia and New Zealand, commented: “Together CommBank and AWS 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.”
CommBank has enhanced its DevOps Hosting Platform to streamline the experience of building and releasing new AI products and features for customers and employees in record time. It also provides out-of-the-box guardrails for the responsible use of AI and native integration with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases for model access and retrieval-augmented generation techniques.
