In one of the most significant banking modernisation programs undertaken in Australia, Commonwealth Bank re-platformed its mission-critical SAP Banking system from mainframe to a cloud-enabled SAP core — a system that processes millions of transactions every day and underpins the country’s financial stability.

In this keynote, Simon Davies, GM Core Banking, takes you behind the scenes of how CBA delivered this landmark transformation: an 18-month effort requiring extraordinary engineering discipline, clear decision-making at scale, cross-functional coordination across 50+ lines of business, rigorous industry stakeholder scrutiny, and near-zero tolerance for disruption.

More than a technology uplift, the program became a defining cultural moment for the organisation — forcing clarity around ownership, standardisation, accountability, and how large institutions change while remaining operational. This was a high-stakes modernisation of national infrastructure, executed live and at scale, without interrupting customer experience.

Simon will reflect on the leadership behaviours, organisational shifts, and cultural conditions that made this level of change possible, and what this experience reveals about the human systems required to sustain innovation, resilience, and SAP-enabled transformation in complex enterprises.