Commonwealth Bank's core banking revamp is slated for completion by the end of the year - the result of a four-year, 1,000 person, A$1.1 billion effort. The bank now has a "vanilla solution with no tailoring", based on SAP software, that Ian Narev, the bank's chief executive, says protects it against having to replace legacy computer systems in the future, as SAP will continue to invest in and upgrade the platform.While it's a "vanilla" solution with very little bespoke content, it still has the smarts to underpin future products and services that will be hard for CBA's rivals to match, according to Narev.He said that although other banks could offer some of the capabilities of CBA's new core platform (St George's systems, for example, allow real-time banking) none had the same breadth of technical capability across all their lines of business.He said that the sorts of products and services that CBA developed on its new core would not be easily matched by the other banks, which would have to perform "unnatural acts that will impose high levels of risk" to offer similar services because they don't have a real-time banking platform. This is especially the case when it comes to cash, as cash becomes increasingly challenged by online and mobile payments, he said.With the core revamp almost complete - Narev said the last business accounts would move across by August - CBA will now concentrate on a number of other smaller technology projects. Narev said that in the year to the end of December 2011 the bank had invested $647 million, and that 28 per cent of this is directed towards the core systems project.He said there were no other IT projects envisaged that were of a similar scale but that there would be "considerable ongoing technology spend".  He gave no indication as to what sort of IT projects were now on the drawing board.Narev did say, however, that an exploration of on-demand and cloud-based services was "absolutely part of the strategy".While Narev stressed that there were no plans to offshore jobs, or establish targets to reduce headcount, he did say that the bank regularly reviewed its skills needs and on occasion made some roles redundant. While Narev did not comment on IT roles in particular, it seems likely that he and CIO Michael Harte will have to run a ruler over the bank's large IT group and determine whether all staff and contractors are still needed once the core program is completed and as the move to cloud-based computing gathers pace.