CommBank pushing weekend NetBank upgrades

The Commonwealth Bank will carry out upgrade work to its NetBank online banking portal at the weekend aimed at boosting the stability and integrity of its systems.

The upgrade, to be carried out on Saturday between 9pm and midnight Sydney time, will result in a range of new features being made available to customers in coming weeks, a bank spokesperson told Computerworld Australia.

These include pending credit and debit card transactions becoming available to view using NetBank mobile, and customers being able to apply for and gain instant credit card limit increases.

The bank released its NetBank mobile banking app for Android smartphones to customers in February — a port of the iPhone mobile banking platform it launched two years ago.

The weekend upgrade will also result in customers gaining functional navigation that “remembers” what account you are viewing when moving between transactions and account information pages, and improvements to its two-factor authentication NetCode SMS service feature aimed at boosting security.

The bank pushed out NetCode to all of its personal banking customers in January. The service, which sends a randomised six digit number to customers’ mobile phones to authenticate certain online transactions, had been running under an opt-in model since its launch five years ago.

“As part of our commitment to continuously improve our services and ensure the ongoing stability and integrity of systems we are required to regularly perform hardware maintenance and software upgrades,” the spokesperson said of the need to carry out the upgrades.

“During scheduled maintenance windows some of our services are unavailable or in limited service mode which is why we typically perform maintenance overnight and on weekends.”

The upgrades follow a period of instability in the bank’s online services including some customers being unable to access funds transfers and BPay payments and NetBank outages and ATM issues.

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