St George has completed its deployment of PeopleSoft CRM on time and half a million dollars under budget.

The $15.9 million solution took seven months to rollout and will enable 8400 staff to provide more 'personalized' services, the Holy Grail of tech success in the financial services industry.

The goal is to increased knowledge of the customer for greater product penetration and cross selling and reduced customer churn.

PeopleSoft was integrated with the Teradata warehouse and other existing CRM systems.

It replaces three legacy systems including the old lead management system, campaign management system and a third-party local marketing solution from Carrekar called Enact.

St George general manager, Greg Booker said it was a business decision rather than a technology push.

"We spent the last four to five years laying the technology and cultural foundations needed to create a service-led sales model before deciding the business case was right to implement PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM," Booker said.

PeopleSoft was selected from six vendors bidding for the deal.

Oracle's local director for financial services industries, Stephen Jack, said the banks are realizing they must innovate to survive.

"With competition and predatory market consolidation increasing, banks need to rethink the huge investments they made in costly, proprietary-based point solutions and move to a service-based model that places the customer directly at the centre; St George has embraced this concept," Jack said.