CommBank cuts tech spend, moves to agile software development

Commonwealth Bank is rolling out 3,852 computer systems changes each month - more than 120 each day - as it continues to ramp up the pace of innovation.

During the bank's half year results presentation yesterday it revealed it had more than doubled its 2009 rate of 1,514 systems updates a month that it made when running on the legacy computing platform.

At the same time the stability of the computing infrastructure at the bank has dramatically improved. In 2009 it endured 314 "high impact system incidents" - computer crashes to the layman - but just 16 in the first half of the current financial year.

While the rate of change owes much to a more flexible core banking platform, it also reflects the bank's adoption of  the 'agile method' of software development.

This favours multiple small software developments rather than risky big-bang projects. As a result many of those 3,852 changes will be relatively minor - some will be just fixes for problems - rather than major upgrades that would be instantly noticed by an employee or customer.

Over time, however, the increased flexibility allows the bank to modify systems on the fly and react quickly to changing market conditions as well as maintain customer-facing innovation.

CBA's chief executive,  Ian Narev, noted that while the bank's mobile phone app had attracted 3 million users logging on 15 million times per week and doing A$2.b million worth of transactions per week it could not afford to rest on its laurels.

"The nature of these sort of customer-facing friendly innovations is that you must keep innovating," he said.

The bank has nevertheless kept tight rein on IT spending. During the half year the bank reduced its IT services expenses by 5 per cent compared to the previous half year, down to A$628 million.