First published in 2018. Click here for some updated news in 2026
Go to CBA, NAB, ANZ, WBC, SUNcorp, BOQ
All the banks have used overnight interbank updating of their individual core platform — banking deposits and transactions history — via COBOL on their IBM mainframe computers
In this article in cio.com.au in 2018 (archived), it was estimated there were 63 mainframes (insourced and outsourced) in Australia. According to IBM, the dominant player in the market, its mainframes run 68 per cent of the world’s production workloads, handle 87 per cent of all credit card transactions, and are used by 44 of the top 50 banks and 18 of the top 25 retailers
In regards to front end systems, there have been significant upgrades to CRM Customer relationship management.
CBA Major upgrade 2008-2012. Fairly successful rollout. The CBA was said to be in an enviable position from an IT management perspective. Ralph Norris, its chief executive (2005 to 2011) — on a $16 million salary in 2011 the highest paid executive in Australia — was himself earlier (in NZ) a CIO chief information officer for the bank.
The strategic partners in the rollout for CBA were: 1.SAP running "SAP for Banking" Solutions using Netweaver (SAP is a German software company that started up in 1972) 2.Accenture (previously Arthur Andersen Accounting) for program implementation. 3.Oracle Database as a Service 4.IBM mainframe computer 5.HP workstations. They also work with Telstra. SAP's English-like programming language ABAP has its language roots in COBOL and Pascal.
The bank will still keep its mainframe at the core of its IT. "It's still very efficient, still very powerful," CIO Michael Harte said.
According to Dave Curran, executive general manager of this core banking modernisation, "You base things on the documentation and history. But (at our end in 2009) you find things that were put there 30 years ago that nobody knew about, which makes testing and piloting very important - to make sure we pick things up before we put something into production that will affect customers," "We have watched a lot of organisations globally, before and during, get bogged down in analysis paralysis; we don't allow people to slip on decisions and go back and revisit things. That has let us build some contingency in our schedule as we know we will have some surprises, it doesn't matter how hard you plan."
Click here for a recent US conference in 2018, CBA still using mainframes and IBM's P-series hardware for tasks including credit card transaction processing.
NAB working with Oracle, has been converting for many years to "NextGen", an "Oracle Banking Platform" (OBP) 2009-2019. Written mostly in Java. NAB and Suncorp to become the first users of this platform in the world. In 2014, concerns expressed internally that the software involved does not scale up as originally envisaged by NAB. The previous system built for NAB back in 1976, used IBM's IMS Database.
ANZ on IBM runs a Computer Science Corporation (CSC) — since 2017 known as DXC Technology — Hogan platform (COBOL based platform). NZ on FIS's Systematic. Asia-Pacific on Infosys's Finacle.
ANZ also runs Red Hat's Openshift Platform for online banking.
WBC's St George started converting its Hogan core banking system to a newer "wrapper" program Celeriti in 2013, completing it in August 2016. Since 2024, it has been migrating the systems back to its Hogan network.
Suncorp in 2010 said it was converting from the Hogan platform to Oracle. On Aug 3, 2017 Suncorp announced migration was being placed on hold. In 2024 ANZ became its new owner.
BOQ 2001-2004 changed to Fiserv's International Comprehensive Banking System (ICBS) running COBOL on IBM's iSeries platform. BOQ's previous system was also written in COBOL with the in-house core banking application running on a Fujitsu mainframe.
In 2021 BOQ partnered with Temenos, a Swiss company, to build a centralized cloud banking platform hosted on Microsoft Azure.