With banks battling to embrace new forms of artificial intelligence, Commonwealth Bank of Australia is turning to one of the global hot spots for the emerging technology.
CommBank has opened a tech hub in Seattle that will serve as a base for attracting and upskilling technology professionals in areas such as generative AI. 75% of banks say gen AI has become important for their organizations, according to
The new Seattle office positions CommBank to take advantage of the deep pool of tech talent in Seattle. It also places the Australian bank physically closer to two of its technology partners: Anthropic, the generative AI company, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud services provider. Both companies have Seattle offices.
The bank said the first group of CommBank technologists at the Seattle hub are focusing on agentic AI, which are autonomous systems that can make decisions and perform tasks with minimal or no human intervention, and genAI, which produces original content such as text, images, videos and other forms of data.
CommBank has had a commercial banking presence in the U.S. since 1977, when it established a New York branch to allow investors and institutions to connect to Australia's capital markets. However, the bank did not position the Seattle tech hub as a strategy for expanding this operation or as a foray into the U.S. retail banking market.
Rather, the Seattle hub will allow CommBank to "bring new ideas back to Australia to enhance how we work, while boosting the knowledge and expertise in Australia's tech ecosystem," according to Gavin Munroe, group executive of technology at CommBank.
AI, and generative AI more specifically, is transforming commercial banking in a variety of ways, according to a report from business payments and cash management company Bottomline, highlighting the need for banks in the U.S. commercial banking market, such as CommBank, to focus on these technologies.
"Commercial banks that embrace the personalization, fraud detection, operational and decision-making capabilities of AI are surging to the forefront of the marketplace," reads the Bottomline report.
The bank recently announced an expansion to its collaboration with AWS to deliver cloud and AI capabilities, and it made a similar announcement about Amazon-backed generative AI firm Anthropic.
The AWS agreement enabled CommBank to build an AI-powered messaging service, which it said went from idea to production in just six weeks, on CommBiz, the bank's business banking offering.
The Anthropic agreement will help the bank create more personalized experiences for customers while maintaining "the highest standards for safety and security," according to Krishna Rao, Anthropic's chief financial officer.
CommBank has leaned heavily into AIcrediting gen AI for significant reductions in customer scam losses and customer-reported fraud. In November, the bank also said its AI-powered messaging app reduced call center wait times by 40% over the previous year.
In another project, CommBank partnered with fraud prevention and intelligence service Apate.AI to deploy AI-powered bots designed to disrupt phone call scams by providing scammers with financial information.
At the Seattle hub, CommBank teams will participate in a three-week exchange program with AWS, Anthropic, H2O.ai, and Microsoft.
CommBank's tech hub will help ensure it "stays ahead of emerging trends and technologies," according to Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of the Business & Industry Copilot team at Microsoft, which builds business applications for Copilot.
Other large banks have also established their own Seattle tech hubs, including JPMorgan Chase, with which CommBank
