Billions of dollars worth of investment in the Commonwealth Bank's back-end computer systems underpins the MyWealth website, which was unveiled yesterday.According to chief information officer Michael Harte, having finished its A$1.1 billion core system revamp last year, the bank is now able to "shift away from big core infrastructure and free up capital to develop content and applications." Without that initial back-end investment, however, the bank could not have created MyWealth.Once considered the Holy Grail of retail banking, customer relationship management has proved harder to achieve in practice than in theory because customer data was traditionally stored in banks' product data silos.However, the introduction of a modern SAP-based core banking platform, along with a single unified set of data accessed across CBA, has allowed the bank to provide customers with integrated, real-time access to data from banking, brokerage, insurance and asset management, providing  them with a single view of their wealth - or, at least, their wealth within the borders of CBA.At this stage, there is no facility to allow customers to drag in to MyWealth data showing investments they may hold elsewhere.Users can log on to the MyWealth.com.au website using their Netbank details, create a MyWealth account and then view their CBA portfolio on a single web page. Filtered news, stock prices and social network content can also be accessed - and stocks purchased directly from the web page. People without a CBA account can still sign up for MyWealth and access the news service and investment dashboards, and create a watch-list of shares for free.While customers get access to a single view of their portfolio, the bank gains a much more detailed understanding of customer behaviour and trends. Harte said: "For the bank, this is about knowing the preferences and behaviour of the investing community."Access to this so-called "big data" will allow the bank to fine-tune its products and marketing approach, based on real-time customer preferences.Although Harte and the IT group at CBA have provided the fundamental technology plumbing for the system, MyWealth itself emerged out of a quasi start-up business unit led by Lisa Frazier, a former McKinsey & Co consultant and founder of a Silicon Valley start-up, who was recruited to the bank last year as the chief innovation officer for equities and margin lending.Harte said: "Large organisations are not always the best places to set up innovation." But he noted that without the preceding massive investment in new core systems (which bank officials acknowledged were a "condition precedent" for the development of MyWealth) it would have been hard for the start-up unit to deliver anything.Frazier and her team of around 85 people - about a third of whom were new recruits from outside the financial sector - started developing the system last June using an Agile approach to systems development; it went live yesterday.