The final 45,000 accounts to be transferred on to Commonwealth Bank's new A$1.1 billion core banking platform will be moved in July. Dave Curran, CBA's core banking program director, said 11 million accounts have already been migrated to the new core platform, which is scheduled to be completed by December.Speaking at a technology update in Sydney yesterday, Curran said that the new payments hub, developed on the new core platform, was now live, and was handling peak rates of 820 transactions per second. A major business lending system also went live on the new core platform on May 14. The real-time platform also provides the bank with a clear view of all its customers and their data - five petabytes in total, which is the equivalent of 100 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with documents.Curran said that the modular construction of the core banking platform - which features 105 separate "logo blocks" of code -  means that if the bank needs a new capability it can use a combination of these blocks to construct new features. "If something's not in there then we build one or two new Lego blocks," says Curran, who claims the new core provides the bank with a "sustainable competitive advantage".Asked what would happen to the 1000-strong IT team that has been working on the core programme, Curran said the staff would be deployed to other IT projects or moved back into the business. "We are not planning a massive reduction," he said.CBA's chief information officer, Michael Harte, meanwhile said that some core banking personnel would likely be involved in plans to deploy the new SAP-based core system into ASB and Bankwest in 2013 and 2014, respectively. The core banking overhaul has been the highest profile IT project at the bank - it has soaked up 25 and 30 per cent of the bank's total investment budget. Harte said that between 2006 and 2012 CBA had invested more than $1 billion a year - 75 per cent of that had been earmarked for IT. Compliance costs accounted for another 30 per cent, with the remainder of the IT investment being devoted to strategic technology investment.A key focus has been on streamlining and consolidation, so, although 50 per cent of the bank's total IT spending had been spent on infrastructure five years ago, that had now been cut to 26 per cent of the overall IT budget.  At the same time, Harte said, the bank had consolidated its data centres down from 23 to two, and, during the last six years, it had improved systems' reliability from a situation where it endured 70 Severity 1 failures (a failure for which there is no obvious workaround) each year down to the current rate of just seven a year.