An in-house built, .NET-based customer account management system deployed by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has increased efficiency and improved customer service, helping employees find data from a single portal that may have previously been in as many as 12 different applications.

With 1,000 branches and 10 million global customers, CBA is one of the largest companies on the Australian Stock Exchange and has an ever-increasing amount of data to manage. The in-house developed system, called CommSee, has replaced processes that were sometimes tracked manually on paper and has linked disparate databases through a single-user portal.

CommSee is essentially a front-end system consisting of a smart client application that uses Windows Forms in Microsoft .NET version 1.1 to integrate data from different databases and back-end systems using Microsoft ASP.NET. The .NET-based architecture enables standards-based interoperability between the bank’s legacy and mainframe-based systems.

Employees now have a single view of a customer, and can see data such as when a customer was last contacted, what products they have, and what their needs are. Previously, information about debit cards and some other products, were not accessible through the bank’s system and employees had to call the customer’s original branch to retrieve some of that data. In addition to customers’ financial data, scanned documents and signatures are also saved in the system.

For employees, the system provides more than a single view of the customer. CommSee also has several tools that streamline and organize workflows for employees. A part of the portal called “My Work Area” serves as a status list of ongoing projects or work that needs follow ups. Another area called “My Processes” displays messages from other employees and work related to a specific customer. A third area called “Everyday Functions” provides access to all the banking applications that are accessible through CommSee.

CommSee, which cost about $75 million to build, is part of a $1.3 billion “Which New Bank” initiative at CWB aimed at improving customer service and corporate culture. One of the other components of the initiative included using the services of EDS to upgrade desktop and branch server infrastructure.