CBA sends over a decade of data to the cloud as AI demand ramps

The Commonwealth Bank has moved more than a decades’ worth of financial data into the cloud in a bid to further rationalise its on-premises systems and accelerate take-up of AI.

The data had steadily accumulated in its on-premises data visualisation platform Tableau during the last 12 years.

However, CBA principal technology product owner Pooja Sharma said that the on-premises deployment became an impediment to meeting internal demand for AI-driven analytics and was recently retired in favour of a cloud-based version of the application managed by the software’s supplier, Salesforce.

“We were dealing with a highly complex [on-premises] environment which had multiple operational overheads, high numbers of incidents, vulnerabilities, ageing infrastructure, increasing cost of ownership, performance issues and so on.

“On the business end, we were seeing fragmented deployments across multiple sites and multiple domains – that was another problem. At the same time, we were also seeing a great demand for real-time insights and AI-driven analytics.

“There was a big shift in business expectation, which was transitioning from earlier just reporting and visualisation to now decision intelligence.

“The question really wasn’t if you modernised or migrated, it was really ‘how fast can we do it while managing risk?’” Sharma said.

The migration gives the bank the ability to access its data through Salesforce's AI-powered analytics application, Pulse, which is only available in the cloud due to its need for large amounts of computing power.

It also lets the bank use the generative AI companion Tableau Agent without the need to make its own arrangements to access large language models (LLMs).

However, according to Salesforce's online documentation Tableau Agent's LLM is set by the software maker's developers.

The bank said that the migration had alleviated it of the infrastructure burden it was shouldering to serve Tableau to more than 25,000 users and shortened average dashboard loading times by 33 percent – bringing them down to less than five seconds in 76 percent of cases.

Adoption of the analytics platform had also increased. The bank recorded a 52 percent increase in dashboard views and a 36 percent jump in use of Tableau workflows.

CBA has been vocal and active about its ongoing transition to cloud computing, with strong backing coming directly from the bank’s chief executive, Matt Comyn.

In 2020, at the company’s half-year results presentation, Comyn announced that the bank had set a target to increase its base of applications and services hosted in public cloud from 25 percent to 95 percent.

At the time, Comyn said that it was the bank’s “largest digital transformation in five years”.

Comyn did not set a clear timeframe to reach the target at the time. However, in late 2021 the bank revealed that the migration was starting to reach scale with the establishment of three special-purpose “execution factories”.

At the time, it said that it hoped the application re-hosting factories would allow the bank push two-thirds of its computing workloads into public cloud by mid-2022 with an expectation that it would meet the 95 percent target within five years.

In May 2022, CBA started to reveal plans to move its SAP-based banking systems into the cloud following a successful CRM migration.

With AI gathering critical mass of momentum, in 2024 the bank announced that it made a “monumental step forward” with the technology by switching on AI factories in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

At the time, it said that that factories were intended to provide a safe operating environment to test and tune large language models that have become the engine of generative AI.

In October last year, the bank hit a major milestone when it announced that it had moved SAP-based core platforms for its retail, business and institutional banking divisions into AWS.

The move put CBA on a well-trod upgrade path for retail and corporate banks, away from superseded on-premises SAP Banking Services to the newer cloud-hosted Transactional Banking (TRBK) for SAP S/4HANA.