Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CommBank) has announced a five-year collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enhance cloud modernisation and artificial intelligence (AI) adoption.
AWS will continue as the bank’s preferred cloud provider, supporting CommBank’s efforts to bolster its digital infrastructure and customer experience.
As part of the collaboration, CommBank is rearchitecting a significant portion of its workloads onto AWS using cloud-native designs.
This initiative aims to simplify the bank’s technology environment, accelerate AI adoption, and enhance the security and speed of service delivery.
The agreement also played a key role in the development of CommBiz Gen AI, an AI-powered messaging service designed to improve banking for thousands of business banking customers.
Built using the bank’s Development Operations (DevOps) Hosting platform and Group Generative.AI Platform, the product moved from concept to production in six weeks.
The service utilises AI to process natural language queries, providing business banking customers with faster access to information and enhanced payment processing capabilities.
It leverages Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, Claude 3, Cohere large language models (LLMs), and Amazon OpenSearch.
AWS Australia and New Zealand financial services director Jamie Simon said: “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.”
According to CommBank, its ongoing cloud modernisation efforts have led to a twofold increase in its ability to deploy system changes, strengthening its digital ecosystem.
In 2024, the bank has doubled its use of AI, reaching over 2,000 AI models
AWS will also provide CommBank engineers with advanced cloud training. In September 2024, CommBank launched its AI Factory, powered by Amazon EC2 P5 Instances, to accelerate AI adoption across the bank.
CommBank has also upgraded its DevOps Hosting Platform on AWS to facilitate the rapid development and release of AI products and features.
The platform integrates with Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, providing built-in guardrails for responsible AI use and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities.
CommBank has been working with AWS for over a decade, progressively migrating core platforms such as NetBank, CommSec, and MUREX from on-premises environments to the cloud.
CommBank chief technology officer Rodrigo Castillo said: “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.”
