The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) share price is in the spotlight today.
This comes as CBA's CEO Matt Comyn is set to join Adam Beavis – Amazon Web Services (AWS) Australia and New Zealand managing director – for the AWS Online Summit.
Comyn and Beavis will look at the expanding role that cloud computing and data is playing in digital banking.
Cloud computing's expanding footprint
Commonwealth Bank is investing $1 billion in technology over the next 5 years. A tidy sum by any standards.
About half of that technology investment will go into risk, resilience, security and data privacy as the bank plans to move 95% of its computing to the public cloud over the coming 5–7 years.
According to Comyn, CBA's foray into technology is far from new:
As a company with a rich history in technological innovation and leadership in Australia, Commonwealth Bank considers technology to have a fundamental role in support our customers. From developing the first mainframe in the 1960s, to rolling out Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) in the 80s and going online for the first time in 1995, CBA has used technology to provide the best in digital banking services to our 7.5 million digitally-active customers.
This is a major opportunity but also represents a significant responsibility in ensuring that we deliver the most personalised and relevant experience to our customers.
CBA and AWS are working together to tailor the suite of products and services they provide via the cloud to their online customers.
Addressing the partnership, Beavis says:
Since 2012, AWS has been proud to support the CBA's venture towards more digitally-focused banking and the effective use of data and analytics to provide the best customer service. It's exciting to see how CBA is leveraging AWS to help empower them to modernise their infrastructure, meet rapidly changing consumer behaviours, and drive business growth, while supporting the most stringent security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
Commsec counts as the first Commonwealth Bank business unit to migrate to AWS back in 2012. This helped enable CBA to quickly scale up Commsec during the height of COVID-19 last year when Commsec facilitated as many as 400,000 trades per day.
Commenting on the success of Commsec, Comyn says:
Ever since 2012, AWS has been working with us to move our workloads to the cloud and were instrumental in allowing us to scale up rapidly during peak trading periods for Commsec during COVID. As we look into the future, CBA is focused on getting more of our core workloads to the cloud and making sure that key applications are running natively on the AWS platform. AWS allows a stronger level of reliability and resilience as we move our workloads to the cloud.
In an age where even our printers and refrigerators communicate via the internet, the role of cloud computing in the business world looks set to keep on growing.
Commonwealth Bank share price snapshot
CBA shareholders have enjoyed a strong year, with shares in the big four banks up 67% over the past 12 months. That easily outpaces the 29% gain posted by the S&P/ASX 200 Index (ASX: XJO).
Year-to-date the Commonwealth Bank share price is up 17%.
