It has been four years since First Union Corp. bought Wachovia Corp. and took its name, and though the two sets of customers were merged long ago, the fusion of the online-banking sites is incomplete.
The First Union site was eliminated shortly after the acquisition was completed. Changing log-in requirements - creating a single log-in system for all customers - has been a real chore, however.
Lawrence Baxter, Wachovia's chief e-commerce officer, said a revamped home page that finally reflects a unified authentication system will be unveiled Saturday morning.
And just in time, because Wachovia is about to start the process anew. In June it will begin converting customers from the former SouthTrust Corp., which Wachovia acquired in November for $14.3 billion.
"It's a big step. We're doing a number of things at once with this site," Mr. Baxter said.
One key is moving the log-in screen to the home page. Though this may sound like a small and mostly aesthetic modification, Mr. Baxter says there is more involved. -Wachovia, for instance, uses the standard user name and password, where First Union required three elements, including a PIN.
Having incompatible authentication systems meant having two log-in mechanisms, and the windows take up a large amount of space on a dedicated Web page, which is reached through a link on the home page.
Wachovia has been phasing out the First Union system since last year, and the new design will rid itself of the First Union log-in process altogether. Users will now enter their log-in data into fields on the home page - "right where our customer research tells us they want it," Mr. Baxter said.
Alenka Grealish, who manages the banking group at the Boston market research firm Celent Communications LLC, said home-page log-ons are "a must-have. The best practitioners out there have had that for several years."
SouthTrust had a log-in window on its home page. George Tubin, a senior analyst at the TowerGroup Inc. unit of MasterCard International, said customers of the Alabama company who are now Wachovia customers might look askance at Wachovia if it did not.
"Whenever a company does a conversion, they always want to maintain par functionality. They never want to take anything away," Mr. Tubin said. "With the new customers coming in, you certainly don't want to have them feel like they're going backwards."
Acquired banks historically have lost 10% to 20% of their customers during a transition, he said, but today "companies like Wachovia and most of the big banks, they strive for zero defections."
Adding the home-page log-in is one way to retain customers, Mr. Tubin noted. "If a consumer feels like they're losing something, then the propensity to change is higher."
Mr. Baxter said the SouthTrust customers will be converted by region to Wachovia.com in the near future. The first group, customers in states where Wachovia already had branches, will be converted during the second weekend of June.
A quarter - 3 million - of Wachovia's customers bank online actively (it has 2 million more e-banking customers it considers inactive).
In addition to the log-in screen, Wachovia is changing its online banking software and bill-payment provider. Last summer it announced it would switch from in-house online banking software to a package from Corillian Corp.
Mr. Baxter said that shift would be gradual, beginning with a few test customers in the early part of the fourth quarter and large-volume switchovers set to be begin in November or December.
The redesign had the Corillian conversion in mind, and the Corillian software delivered "the same look and feel" as the new design, Mr. Baxter said.
Another incomplete conversion is the change from Marshall & Ilsley Corp.'s Metavante Corp. to CheckFree Corp. for the bill-pay site's processing. Of Wachovia's nearly 540,000 active bill-pay customers, 169,831 use CheckFree, against about 140,000 in mid-November. Since March 5, all new bill-pay customers have been enrolled into the CheckFree system.
Mr. Baxter said other added or improved features include a branch and automated teller machine locator tool and a prominent link for people who want to find out more about Wachovia's anti-fraud measures.
