Shaping what’s next: The foundations of modern banking

Priyanka Pattekar was very happily living in London when CommBank came calling.

Having held senior business banking technology roles at HSBC across Europe, the UK and the Middle East, when the opportunity in Australia came up, she says she wanted to get back into business-focused technology and could see a compelling direction in CommBank's investment in AI and platform modernisation.

"I didn't want to come and just run some old systems," she says. "I wanted to come in and really be part of a modernisation journey,” she said. 

As Executive General Manager and CIO Business Banking Technology, Pattekar saw an opportunity to help shape one of the world's most advanced banking technology environments. She says it was CommBank's engineering-first mindset and technology ambition that drew her back to Australia. 

"The chance to solve complex problems at this scale, with teams that genuinely care about customer outcomes, was incredibly exciting," she says.

An engineering-first mindset

Today, one of her most immediate priorities is modernising a hybrid stack that is critical to workflows that only work properly if it's seen through to completion.

That priority also reflects the broader philosophy she brings to her role: finish the hard work properly, keep the foundations strong, reuse where appropriate and apply AI where it can make a clear difference for customers and teams. 

After building her career in senior technology roles overseas, Pattekar says it was CommBank's approach to technology that particularly aligned with her own thinking.

"What I was looking for, and what really aligned with my thinking, was an engineering-first mindset," she says.

And that doesn't mean "coding all the time.”

Rather, it's about critical thinking and looking at a problem in all dimensions before trying to solve it.

"More is not always the best," she says. It's often better, she argues, to build something properly once and then use it many times. Doing things that way cuts duplication, cuts the risk of silos developing and helps eliminate the overhead that builds up when the same problem is solved repeatedly in different places.

Beyond ‘like for like’

Pattekar says modernisation is not about swapping one system for another. As the stack evolves, she says the foundations have to improve as well, including risk and control posture and resilience. 

“It’s not just a like for like,” she says. 

Building the right foundations also means a thorough approach to governance. “It’s making sure those guardrails are there in practice and not just an on-paper exercise,” she says.  

The point, Pattekar says, is to build systems and disciplines that still hold up later, when teams need to understand what was decided, why it was decided and whether the controls still mean something in practice. 

Where AI is useful 

In a similar way, for Pattekar, AI is something thought about in very practical terms. It has real potential, for example, to help Australian business banking customers who want more customised, individualised and personalised support.  

“It always comes back down to seeing a tangible outcome,” she says.   

That might be a new app, a new channel or an internal tool that makes a slow manual process much quicker. She cites the example of an AI solution that allows statements to be ordered in minutes rather than days. “You can see the value very quickly,” she says. 

Why the environment matters 

That practical bent also shapes how Pattekar thinks about technology cycles. Systems that might once have been expected to stay in place for years may now be replaced much sooner, she says, which calls for a more flexible mindset from leaders as well as teams. 

“CommBank has an experimental mindset and provides great tools. But the tools themselves aren’t the point”, she says. “Something exciting is happening here. There’s a real purpose-driven mindset to enable the people to use that technology.”