By June this year Commonwealth Bank will have completed its six-year core banking modernisation program. By then commercial lending will have migrated to the new system and the big IT project will be finished.CBA chief executive Ian Narev said the bank's focus would turn to exploiting the capabilities of the system, to give the bank an edge in its distribution channels. Speaking at the presentation of the bank's December half results yesterday, Narev said: "A 24/7 real-time platform will give [us] a distinct advantage."Narev said the bank was already seeing some returns from its investment in its retail division, Retail Banking Services. During the December half, the number of personal transaction accounts increased by 13 per cent, and transaction account balances increased by nine per cent.Last week, the bank launched a new investment service, MyWealth. The core banking system allows the bank to assemble data from a client's banking, brokerage, insurance and asset management accounts into a single view.Narev promised more developments. By the end of June, CBA will have video-conferencing facilities in every one of its 1000 branches. These are designed to put banking specialists in touch with customers wherever they are.The retail bank, which generated 39 per cent of CBA's cash profit in the half, put in a strong performance. Its cash profit rose 13 per cent - the best result for any of the bank's divisions. Its cost-to-income ratio fell below 40 per cent and loan impairment expenses fell 29 per cent.The downside for the division is that, in its attempt to manage its margins, the bank has allowed its home loan and deposit share to fall.Narev said competition for deposits was strong and the bank had been careful not to write deposit business that would erode shareholder value."You have to make a trade-off. As margins improve you will see those trends reverse. We would be crazy not to look at market share."Narev said another area where the bank's investment in technology was paying dividends was in productivity gains. "We did not go down the path of big redundancy programs and big cost-cutting programs, but rather we said: well, we're going to take a considered, multi-year approach to improving the fundamental process ability of the group." In the retail branch network, transactions per customer service representative increased six per cent relative to the year before, while sales and converted referrals per customer service specialist increased 16 per cent.Narev said: "When we do a big migration of retail deposit customers from a legacy platform onto SAP, we've got every step of how to test that, how to migrate them, how to follow up. It's very cleverly coded. "But it's never going to be a matter of just emailing those instructions to a bunch of people in a new bank and say 'go do this'. You need very experienced people who you are prepared to lift out of the business, without impacting [on the] continuity of this business, [and] send to the new institution [to] work on that for