iTnews Benchmark Awards 2019: Finance finalists revealed

iTnews will this week announced finalists in five categories of our annual Benchmark Awards.

Late in 2018 we announced finalists in the State Government and Local Government categories.

Today, meet the three institutions our judges felt most worthy of a place on the podium in our Finance category.

In a very tricky twelve months for the sector, these three have demonstrated innovations that should make for greater agility, a better customer experience and easier compliance.

All finalists will now be invited to our gala awards dinner on the 7th of March at KPMG's stunning Barrangaroo offices.

Next steps? iTnews will share a story about each finalist with our LinkedIn group of CIOs for their input, before combining our own assessment and theirs to decide the winner of each category AND the winner of our IT Leader of the Year award.

We'll explain more about that soon, but for now here are this year's finalists in the Finance category:

Commonwealth Bank 'One Cloud'

The Commonwealth Bank has built a colossal hybrid cloud that taps VMware, Dell, AWS and Azure, to create a platform the Bank now sees as ready to host even core legacy apps.

The Bank has moved more than 9,500 virtual machines and the 2,000 apps they run to its hybrid cloud, and along the way adopted infrastructure-as-code techniques for their future evolution.

ROI has been strong - 30 percent cost reductions alone - while the prospect of future benefits from a more agile platform seem all-but-assured.

As it unfolded

ING identity management

Identity management is the foundation of any enterprise computing effort and in 2018 ING made an effort to improve its authentication engines.

Motivated by a desire to ensure staff could access the applications and data they need as soon as possible after joining the Bank, ING implemented a new system that matches hew hires' roles to its application estate.

The result? Access on day one of a new worker's tenure, rather than days of manual requests. And as a side benefit, a far better ability to prove just who accesses what and when, to help with compliance issues raised by a certain Royal Commission ... 

Read more about this project here

CUA Australia personal banking portal

Australians have taken to internet and mobile banking in their millions, but CUA decided that it could enhance the experience for its ~500,000 users by making their experience more personal.

The result is a new smartphone app that links members to personal bankers.

Delivered in just four months, the results have already been impressive: user numbers blew away targets and those who adopt the service are younger, more engaged and feel better about doing business with CUA.

Read more about this project here