Steve Ellis will never forget the day it dawned on him that people would want to bank on their phones. "I was walking in San Francisco, I was on my BlackBerry and I walked in front of a bus," recalls Ellis, who is executive vice president and group head of the Wells Fargo Wholesale Services Group, which includes the Enterprise Payments Strategy, Technology Services, and Treasury Management groups, along with commercial loan services, customer analytics, marketing and communications, risk management, and mobile and social media strategies.
"The guy was nice enough to stop and the cop gave me a warning," he says. "I said thank you and looked up and realized everyone was on a phone. I thought, these phones have browsers, they're probably as powerful as the first computer ever used, if not more, why wouldn't people bank with these things? It's so obvious." He approached his boss with this idea and won a $5 million budget to build mobile banking apps for business customers.
Ellis put together a team to create a mobile banking app for corporate clients called CEO Mobile that debuted in 2007 (he also launched the bank's online version of CEO Mobile in 2000). Wells was the first bank to have a product of this kind to let business customers do things like approve wire transfers while at an airport or in a cab. The app allows for mobile check deposit (useful for clients who do product deliveries and receive checks on the road) and for handling T&E on the road -- about 30% of commercial card customers use it.
Today, Ellis, who got pulled into the Wachovia/Wells Fargo merger integration for a few years, is back managing digital offerings for corporate clients of the $1.37 trillion San Francisco bank, with help from a team of 6,700 employees, including 2,100 technologists, around the world, with concentrations in Charlotte, Denver, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Hyderabad, India.
"We build most of our own stuff because we don't want to rely on a third party vendor," he says. "Not that we have anything against third party vendors, we use them in a lot of places, but this is a world where people adopt something and it's cool for a couple of months, then they say, can you do this, can you do that? You can be much more flexible and responsive if you're building your own stuff." Wells Fargo does a lot of customer testing and prototyping, and bases 80% of its technology on direct feedback from customers that it gleans from its 26 advisory councils and 12 payment conferences, Ellis says.
During a recent visit, we asked Ellis mostly about the future of corporate mobile banking technology.
A challenge and trend Ellis's group is working on is the need to accommodate the many devices customers use and create digital banking channels in a "write once, deliver many" way. CEO Mobile is currently designed for smartphones, but plans are to deliver it to iPads, iPad Minis, Surfaces, Kindles and even Wiis. "We have people who use Wiis to access information and move money," he observes. "It wasn't quite built for that. What do you do when you're playing a game? 'Oh wait a minute, I've got to approve a wire.'"
Ellis's team is using HTML5 to create web pages that can recognize which device they're being read and automatically reformat for that device; it's rolled out a few already and plans to launch more in the second quarter of 2013. "What we learned on the tablet pretty quickly was that thousands of customers were using it to get to our website, and our website wasn't optimized for iOS," Ellis says.
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