Australian Commonwealth Bank moves entire core banking system to AWS (www.afr.com)

Commonwealth Bank (CBA) has completed a landmark migration of its entire core banking stack into data centres managed by Amazon Web Services — a first for an Australian bank and one of the largest core-to-cloud moves globally. The shift covers the ledgers that record deposits and loans and the processing engines that handle all retail, business and institutional transactions. CBA’s technology chief framed the move as foundational for a future in which lenders are powered by artificial intelligence. Technically, hosting core systems in AWS gives CBA elastic compute, storage and networking capacity to run large-scale analytics and ML workflows against rich, real‑time transaction and ledger data — enabling faster model training, continuous retraining, real‑time fraud detection, personalization and embedded finance services. The migration is significant for the AI/ML community because it reduces friction to deploy cloud-native ML platforms and experiment at bank scale, while also raising questions around regulatory compliance, data residency, resilience and operational governance in a heavily regulated industry. As a high-profile precedent, the deal signals broader industry momentum toward cloud-native financial infrastructure that can accelerate production ML use cases across banking.