A decision by Ameritech to deemphasize screen telephones has led Citicorp to modify its ambitious plans to market remote banking services in the Midwest.
The change of course may extend to Citicorp's overall home banking effort, which is said to be looking toward personal computers as the preferred delivery mechanism.
Several executives in Citicorp's remote banking area have left, but it was not clear how directly the departures were related to the retreat from screen phones.
The parent of Citibank, the nation's largest bank, had been one of the strongest proponents of high-tech telephones as home banking devices.
Hoping to prove their appeal, Citicorp announced an alliance in 1993 with Ameritech, which said it would distribute such phones to some 200,000 Chicago-area households starting in the spring of 1994.
It was to be the largest market test of its kind, using highly sophisticated - but relatively expensive - hardware made by an affiliate of Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, which had worked closely with Citicorp on the system design.
Ameritech installed fewer than 10,000 of the phones before recently deciding not to go further, one source said. That left Citicorp with too few screen phone customers and too little growth potential to make the project viable.
Spokesmen for Ameritech and Citicorp would not confirm the numbers or discuss them.
"If it is dead, who will notice?" said Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications Co., a consultant in Bethesda, Md. "It wasn't exactly a marketing bonanza. PC banking is where it's at."
The project's end, coupled with the recent personnel departures, seems to signal a pullback from screen phone technology and a "changing of the guard" in Citicorp's home banking department, a source close to the bank said.
The bank, which also has marketed screen phones as a "virtual banking" alternative in the New York and Washington markets, is not ready to bury them, said spokeswoman Susan Weeks.
"We think (screen phone technology) has much more potential in the future," she said.
She tied what happened in Illinois to Ameritech's decision in May to "redeploy its resources elsewhere." She called the pilot "very successful."
Richard A. Maganini, a spokesman for Ameritech, confirmed that the Chicago project is "winding down."
He said the initial tests with Citicorp were only intended to last a year and the results were "positive." He said Ameritech similarly had not totally deserted screen phones but is focusing more on PC technology.
Citicorp has been actively marketing PC-based services, and there were indications it would be one of the partners of Intuit Inc. in linking banking services to the Quicken financial planning program. But when Intuit released its initial list of 19 financial institutions this month, Citicorp was not on it.
At least five remote banking division officers have left the bank, including Bernell Wright, a vice president in the Citicorp Technology Office and self-proclaimed "architect" of the screen phone project. At the bank six years, he worked on an early type of screen phone, the Enhanced Telephone, which Philips made for Citicorp.
Ms. Weeks, the spokeswoman, pointed out that none of the departing executives - others included Walter Greenberg and Al Lau, who headed what the bank calls its Access team, and Sandy Brumley, and Steve Price, who headed strategic implementation - was exclusively dedicated to screen phone development.
She said Mr. Greenberg and Mr. Lau decided to resign earlier this year because they were unwilling to relocate to Chicago, where the new head of the strategic implementation division, Jean-Paul Votron, chose to be based.
Mr. Wright left in late June to open a New York-based consulting firm, Advanced Business Concepts. He denied that he or any of the others were forced out but said the bank was "looking more critically at other alternatives that are out there."
"When I looked around, I didn't see a chair," Mr. Wright said.
A source who asked to remain anonymous said the Chicago program got bogged down in "so much finagling" between Ameritech and Citicorp over basic marketing issues like "who would own the customer."
A further complication, sources said, was that the two corporate giants were often at cross-purposes in their efforts to gain market acceptance. They had also endorsed a telephone that retails for several hundred dollars, well above the $100 to $200 price points that other screen-phone marketers have aimed for.
"Ameritech, no matter what they say, is a phone company," said a source, adding that the Baby Bell was more concerned with network issues than transaction processing and phone sales.
Paul Chapple, a spokesman for Philips Home Services in Burlington, Mass., said it will move the customers in the Citicorp pilot from an Ameritech processing platform to a Philips platform, on which they can continue to initiate financial transactions.
