The Commonwealth Bank is one of Australia’s leading providers of integrated financial services. Salmat is a long-standing Commonwealth Bank business partner, processing a range of high volume mail, including statements, credit card material and other essential communications.

Salmat has provided the Commonwealth Bank’s Central Electronic Archive (CEA) solution since March 2002. The CEA uses IBM’s OnDemand electronic document archive solution residing on servers and storage infrastructure hosted in our NSW data centres in St Leonards and Moorebank.

The CEA stores statement images of all the banking products we process for up to seven years. There is currently in excess of 980 million statements comprising more than two billion impressions stored online in the CEA.

The CEA is accessed by up to 2000 staff within the CBA, including call centre and branch staff.

Early in 2007 Salmat was asked by the CBA to develop a solution to integrate the CEA with the CBA’s Netbank internet banking portal, to provide customer self-service to statements.

The business drivers behind the Online Statements project were:

• The most popularly requested enhancement to Netbank by CBA customers was the ability to access statements online.
• A reduction in the cost and environmental impact of printing and mailing more than 60 million statements per annum.

The Online Statements project commenced in July 2007 and included the implementation of new server infrastructure to provide a highly scalable and available solution to meet the requirements for 99.99% uptime 24 hours a day,  365 days a year.

The project also required the development of a new Content Access Service Endpoint (CASE) product to provide the secure business to business interface between the CBA applications and the Salmat archive.

In addition the project also included the migration of the existing internal CBA users over to the new architecture.

The performance requirements of the Online Statements solution were to be able to process up to 72,000 statement requests per hour with an average statement retrieval response time of less than two seconds. During the extensive performance testing undertaken by the CBA, the Salmat solution exceeded all of the performance requirements.

The Online Statements project went live on 13 January 2008 and has provided the CBA with the most complete and fully featured Online Statements capability of any Australian bank.