Commonwealth Bank of Australia

NetBank First In Line

The 1.5 million customers of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's (CBA) NetBank were the first in the country to experience the revolutionary new online billing system developed by BPAY, known as BPAY View[tm].

BPAY View is an extension of BPAY's hugely successful bill payment system, enabling customers to retrieve and store billing information on their bank's Internet site. Instead of having to sit down with a handful of paper bills, or go to multiple Internet sites to find all of their outstanding bills, customers can log on to the single site and conduct all of their bill payments.

For the billers, it means they only have to invest in one standards-based output for their bills. Already a costly process, billing will become automated and streamlined, whereby a single bill file can be sent to BPAY View for distribution to any bank.

Partner Adds Power

The launch of BPAY View at CBA in January marked a significant milestone not only for BPAY but also for the Sun[tm] Open Network Environment (Sun ONE) strategy. Sun and partner EDS Australia were responsible for architecting, developing and implementing the world-first solution that acts as a gateway to BPAY View for the bank.

The solution, developed by Sun Professional Services, is based on the Sun ONE architecture and iPlanet's BillerXpert Consolidator Edition software. It acts as a gateway between the BPAY Hub (which billers communicate their billing information to) and CBA's NetBank, consolidating end customers' bill summaries for presentation to NetBank. Consolidation - unique to this solution - holds all bills at the Hub, creating a centralised repository that is easier for banks and billers to communicate with.

With development time of less than four months, Sun PS has helped CBA speed time to market and offer its customers the first taste of BPAY View.

Built For The Biggest

CBA's NetBank has the largest account base in the Australian market. The new architecture provides a number of critical BPAY View functions to this vast customer base, including:

• Gateway facilities allowing NetBank customers to transparently interact with the new BPAY hub via Open Financial eXchange (OFX) standards
• Presentation of bill summary information via industry standard web service mechanisms (SOAP, XML and HTTP), and
• Administration and security facilities to seamlessly manage the NetBank-to-BPAY-hub interaction, providing the end users with high availability, scalability, reliability and manageability.

Technical features are based upon a Sun ONE architecture, including:

• Open standards implementations of Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Open Financial exchange (OFX) protocol
• N-tier based software infrastructure to provide high levels of availability, scalability, reliability and security, and
• The Sun ONE architecture that supports the integration of the full range of commercial-off-the-shelf applications, platform networked hardware and custom-developed Java code.

The solution deploys Sun Enterprise[tm] 420 and Sun Enterprise 220 workgroup servers in production and disaster recovery configurations, running on the Solaris[tm] Operating Environment. It also uses iPlanet Application, Directory and Web servers and an Oracle database server.