Just 11,000 of the Bank's customers and 1,000 staff will use the new system, which runs using software from Eontec, an Irish Internet banking specialist acquired by Siebel in April 2004.
The new site features many security enhancements but does not use twin-factor authentication.
Users are asked to create two personalised security questions and corresponding answers before they use the new service, with this data used as an additional authentication tool for some transactions. The site will also now send e-mails to confirm transactions.
Other new features include home and investment home loan transaction histories, international money transfers, multiple bill payments, online password resets and the ability to stop cheques online.
The pilot also offers customers the chance to view logs of their previous visits to NetBank, greets users by name and offers a less cluttered interface while retaining all features from the current version of NetBank.
A Commonwealth Bank spokesman told ZDNet Australia that more features would be revealed as the pilot progresses, but could not say when the bank plans to switch all of its users to the enhanced service.
"It is quite commonplace for these pilots to occur before the major rollout," the spokesperson said. "It is very early days and we are confident that customers will enjoy it, but there is no target date for mass switchover".
Great new site and congratulations on not introducing painful token authentication. Banks that are talking of implementing tokens need to realise that it doesn't protect against trojans that wait for users to be logged in before making a fraudelent transfer in the background nor does it protect against "man in the middle" attacks where a phishing site simply gets the users details including the token p****word at the time and p****es it to the real bank. The fraudulent site then is "in session" and in control to do anything.