Reinventing business banking on AWS for a leading financial institution
One of Australia’s biggest financial institutions wanted to transform its customer’s experience, but they were being held back by legacy technology. Despite its scale and reputation, its ability to innovate and grow while serving clients was constrained. Partnering with Cevo, the bank reinvented its core business banking platform on AWS. This was a transformation designed not just for today’s needs, but to underpin decades of growth and leadership.
Zero incident
Flawless cutover
Migration
Solution
Financial services
Industry
Business challenge
The institution’s business banking division serves a significant client base, manages tens of billions in deposits, and a significant commercial loan portfolio. Operating at this scale requires resilient, data-driven platforms that can adapt rapidly to shifts in the economy, from inflation and wage pressures to commercial property cycles and employment trends.
For decades, the organisation’s on-premises core banking platform had supported growth. But as customer expectations evolved, regulatory demands tightened, and digital-first competitors accelerated, the technical limitations placed constraints on the bank’s ability to innovate and deliver new features. Costs were escalating, agility was constrained, and the legacy systems created bottlenecks in scalability, reliability and innovation, making it increasingly difficult to deliver timely, data-driven services at a national scale.
The organisation’s legacy core systems had become the single biggest barrier to growth and improved customer services, with escalating costs, limited agility and the risk of falling behind more innovative competitors. The organisation needed resilient operations capable of adapting to constant market and regulatory change, scalable platforms to handle millions of daily transactions seamlessly, and consolidated data-driven insights to drive faster, more accurate decision-making.
Solution
Cevo worked side by side with the financial institution to execute a multi-phase migration and modernisation of the business banking platform on AWS. Given the critical nature of these systems, a phased approach was essential to reduce risk, achieve early wins and safeguard customer services while managing the complexity of transformation at this scale. The first phase focused on migrating and modernising applications, batch processing and reporting workloads over 12 months, while the second phase addressed the re-platforming of numerous databases, moving them from legacy engines into Amazon RDS over a period of an additional seven months.
Comprehensive transformation and modernisation
Beyond migration, the program delivered a wide-ranging modernisation of the platform that directly enabled major business growth. The reporting environment was overhauled, with more than 130 legacy reports consolidated into AWS-native solutions. This uplift improved performance and maintainability, and enabled the retirement of over 400 redundant reports. Java applications were refactored to run more reliably on modern cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, long-standing monolithic systems were decomposed into modular, independently deployable components, accelerating development cycles and simplifying future maintenance. Together, these technology advances have enabled the bank to continue to grow and provide product enhancements to customers.
Advanced automation for enhanced security and reliability
Automation was embedded throughout the transformation to ensure security, reliability and efficiency. Blue/green deployment practices were introduced to minimise downtime during releases, while automated testing and real-time monitoring frameworks proactively identified and resolved issues. The program also incorporated extensive assurance and compliance testing to meet stringent APRA requirements, giving the institution confidence in the resilience and governance of its modernised platform.
Collaboration and knowledge transfer
Equally important was the way the program was delivered. Cevo consultants embedded themselves within the organisation’s platform group, bringing in a proven agile delivery model with regular stand-ups, iterative delivery and progress transparency. The institution went on to adopt this approach more broadly, a testament to the strength of Cevo’s delivery capability. Hands-on training, detailed runbooks and knowledge-sharing sessions ensured the organisation’s staff were fully equipped to manage, govern and continuously improve the new cloud-native environment well beyond the completion of the project.
Outcomes and impact
Flawless execution with zero disruption
The cutover of critical banking systems was completed without a single incident, which was a remarkable outcome given the complexity of migrating business-critical infrastructure. As one executive described it: “This was flawless execution.” And all banking clients continued to transact seamlessly throughout the transition.
Resilient, scalable foundations for national scale
The institution can now operate as a near 24/7 bank, with transaction processing times cut dramatically and batch workloads optimised for performance. Over 700 jobs and applications were modernised, ensuring resilience and speed across one of the largest business banking portfolios in Australia.
Significant efficiency and cost optimisation
The transformation embedded automation that reduced manual processes from hours to seconds and streamlined thousands of daily operations. These efficiencies directly contributed to improved profitability, with the business division delivering double-digit profit growth. Workforce optimisation also followed, with automation and AI integration enabling the organisation to reduce operational costs without impacting service quality.
Enjoyed this customer story?
Share it with your network!
You may also like
