Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has been working on renovating the bank, taking advantage of the tech upgrades required to comply with the open banking regime under the Consumer Data Right (CDR) and continuing to push forward during a pandemic.
Speaking with ZDNet, the bank's CIO Andrew Cresp called it a "COVID reno".
"A lot of people actually did the COVID reno in Melbourne and I think there's a few little similarities there," he said. "People renovate to modernise and to simplify, and Bendigo is 162 years old, and while we haven't quite got Darryl Kerrigan's The Castle type add-ons, there may be some parallels you can sort of draw."
Cresp said Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has been using open banking as one of the foundational items of what the bank is building out for the future of the organisation. He said cloud is a critical component of that.
Australia's fifth biggest retail bank has been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) since March 2020. Within that time, the bank has worked with AWS on skilling its workforce to move more than 30 apps in 30 days onto Amazon EKS as part of its transformation strategy, in addition to the open banking piece.
"COVID has been a beautiful opportunity for us as an engineering organisation, especially as one based regionally in Bendigo and Adelaide," he said.
With AWS moving its Summit and Re:Invent conferences online this year, Cresp said the bank would have likely sent around 5% of its engineers previously to Canberra for Summit, with "no chance" of sending anyone to Las Vegas.
"We had 90% of our engineers attend Summit and then in November, we had learning month, we had more than 50% of our engineers do AWS training," he explained. "So I look at