Suncorp, which has invested over A$1 billion on technology-based initiatives to streamline and simplify its operations, claims it is on track to complete the bulk of the transformation, including moving across to a new Oracle core banking platform,  by mid-2016.The Oracle system is the same core banking platform that is being rolled out at NAB, and is already deployed at its online-only UBank subsidiary.Jeff Smith, CEO of business services at Suncorp, speaking after the annual investor day in Sydney yesterday, said that once the major program of works is complete it will deliver the banking and insurance business with a cost-to-income ratio improvement of 4 per cent a year.Suncorp is also booking $235 million worth of annualised savings as a result of its systems simplification initiative. That process is continuing - for example Suncorp's 15 insurance systems will be streamlined to just two by 2016.In addition it has been able to reduce office space by 20 per cent and cut the number of suppliers it uses by 45 per cent.While Suncorp has acknowledged spending more than $1 billion on the overall transformation programme it does not disclose its annual technology budget.It must however be significant as besides overhauling its technology platforms, the organisation has undergone an internal reorganisation, forming a business intelligence unit bringing together data analysts and technologists into an 850-person unit. Suncorp has also appointed a chief data officer, Adrian McKnight, who will be looking to mine the organisation's data reservoirs for nuggets of value.Suncorp says it will complete the construction of a single enterprise-wide data store during the next financial year, providing a single source of data for the entire business.This, it says, will provide improved customer insights, allow it to better price products and services, gain a clear view of operational performance and financials, and provide a better platform from which to identify and tackle fraud.Suncorp yesterday also outlined its continued appetite for cloud computing.According to Smith: "Cloud is lowering hardware costs and reducing risk by spreading workloads and building more resilient, scalable applications. This allows us to innovate faster and gives us a powerful point of differentiation."But chief information officer Matt Pancino noted that Suncorp's cloud plans had been subject to "natural limits" imposed by a number of key cloud computing vendors, such as Microsoft, still not having Australia-based data centres. Suncorp, like most banks, still baulks at the idea of sending data to offshore clouds.Nevertheless, Pancino said "we have quite advanced plans for cloud," while stressing that Suncorp worked closely with its lines of business and the regulator in order to "never go outside the risk appetite of our businesses."He said it was likely that systems development and testing would move to the cloud over the next six months with a significant proportion of Suncorp's disaster recovery requirements also being delivered by cloud computing vendors by December.