Bank of Queensland intends to go "all-in" on the public cloud and "exit its traditional data centers" under a plan taken to the bank's board for approval.
Chief information officer Craig Ryman told iTnews that "strategically, we are all-in on the public cloud."
"Our intent will be to migrate everything to the public cloud as a starting point," Ryman said.
"There'll be some applications that won't have a return-on-investment [to migrate]; we'll ultimately want to retire them, and so we might have a few exceptions.
"But largely, we're all-in on public cloud and the vision I've got for BoQ is that we will be out of all data centers for public cloud."
The bank is currently in the midst of a core banking transformation with Temenos, which forms a central part of a $440 million multi-year transformation strategy unveiled in 2020.
It is building two related core platforms: one for its retail bank operations and one for its more complex business operations.
All retail brands - Virgin Money, BoQ, and ME Bank - are moving to a Temenos T24 banking-as-a-service core.
Business customers will be served by a separate Temenos T24 core that is hosted on-premises in BoQ's private cloud environment, owing to the complexity of serving business users.
iTnews understands the business instance is ultimately scheduled to shift from private cloud to public cloud hosting sometime in 2023, enabling BoQ to fulfill its public cloud ambitions.
Core strategy
Previously, Ryman said, BoQ operated as a "portfolio of businesses", each with its own systems.
"If you think about what it takes to build an end-to-end bank for where we're at at the moment, it's about 40-odd platforms," he said.
The group considered that "the fastest way of getting to the highest quality result was to build a new stack and take the complexity of migrating our customers to that stack in full, as opposed to trying to renovate all of the complexity that we had piece by piece."
The core consolidation will see all of the bank's operations moved to one end-to-end technology stack.
"Simple retail customers - VMA, BoQ, and ME - will have this end-to-end cloud platform. Our complex customers will sit on a different origination and a different core banking platform," Ryman said.
"But largely there'll be lots of integration [points], like an enterprise cloud-based data and analytics stack that'll be leveraged across the group, a common CRM and a common customer experience layer which will have data analytics leveraged to create personalized customer experiences, and that'll sit across business and retail."
