Innovation in Online Banking

Commonwealth Bank of Australia Redefines the Customer Experience

Commonwealth Bank of Australia embarked on a plan to give its customers the ultimate one-stop shop online banking experience. The result, The Finest Online, rolled out in February of this year, enables Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s customers to log on to the bank’s NetBank site with a single sign-on and gain access to retail banking, investment and insurance information. And that is only the beginning.

The re-launched site not only introduces customers to a unified view of their financial dealings across segments of the financial industry, but it also introduces customers to an integrated multi-channel experience. In other words, because the different channels of communication with customers are now more tightly intertwined, a customer who starts an application online can now walk into a branch and pick up the application process where they left off online. The new sales and service platform combines activity between the branches, Internet and call center.

Tim Whiteley, Executive General Manager, Service Development

In addition, the new site’s universal inbox means that rather than having to look at different places and sites, customers now have one inbox through which they receive a wide spectrum of messages from the bank, whether it’s notices about where they are in the origination process of a product, confirmations about payments they have made, or a long list of other communications. Furthermore, the universal inbox provides customers an extra layer of security and privacy as sensitive messages no longer need to be emailed to an external email but are contained within the site, accessed through a secure login.

                                                             Members of the Finest Online management team (from left):  Rob Webb,             
                                                            Jonathan Gibson, Kath Kelly, Lojana Kumar, Soon Yuen, Kevin McNamara

The sites through which customers access this information can now be customized through new forms of personalization. There are two basic flavors of home pages for customers to the site – one more traditional and a second, more new age, groovier one. Customers can then pick and choose elements they wish to add to their home pages whether they are FX calculators, mortgage calculators or stock related data.

Web chat has also been added for originations to create a more social computing experience and customers have been empowered to do more self-service activities from their computers. For example, a recent trend in Australia was the lowering of ATM daily limits as a security measure, and that can be done by customers from their computers. Customers can also check the status of applications.

These changes were made through leveraging Microsoft technology including .NET 3.5 on a standard Wintel Web tier application style architecture using an Oracle database. To create a rich customer experience and a compelling look and feel while presenting information to the customer pulled from various subsystems, the bank used a variety of technologies including Microsoft AJAX.

Moving forward the bank is implementing a new core banking system which will improve the ability of the online channel to provide customers a more real-time 24/7 banking experience, opening accounts and posting transactions in real-time.