Bank of America Corp.’s Global Wealth and Investment Management business unit is using software from Microsoft Corp. to make it easier for employees to see information about customer accounts.
Tim Huval, the unit’s chief information officer, said Monday that B of A is installing Microsoft’s SharePoint software on all computers used by investment advisers in his group. Some have it now, and all will have it by yearend.
SharePoint enables Bank of America’s applications to access shared data. The software uses service-oriented architecture, which is designed to make applications interoperate without relying on one another. Without SharePoint, B of A’s investment advisers have to log out of one program and into another when customers ask about a different account, Mr. Huval said.
Customers interact with the Charlotte-based company primarily by phone. Aggregating information about all of their accounts makes each session “seamless, and obviously more efficient,” Mr. Huval said.
“Customers are looking for a seamless experience,” he said. They do not want to “feel like they’re calling a different organization every time.”
The software will also make life easier for the advisers. “Our associates are jazzed about it, even the ones who don’t have it yet,” Mr. Huval said.
Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said B of A’s project is all about giving customer service reps more to work with.
“Information really is the empowering tool for that person to do their best job growing revenue,” he said at a Microsoft conference in New York last week, according to a transcript of his speech posted online by Microsoft, of Redmond, Wash.
Mr. Huval also spoke at the conference, and described a sample customer interaction using SharePoint. “If they want to place a trade and yet have a question about a mortgage or a checking account, everything from mass market throughout our franchise, we’re able to deliver on that,” he said.
He said Monday that these things are possible now, but the process is smoother with the SharePoint software.
At first only investment advisers in Mr. Huval’s unit will use the software, Mr. Huval said. “This is something we want to launch and get right in the GWIM business,” he said, though he plans to “make sure it’s known” to other Bank of America business units.
Another Charlotte banking company, Wachovia Corp., is using service-oriented architecture software from International Business Machines Corp. to create a centralized data archive that to store information for multiple applications.
That project has been under way for two years, and is expected to take another two years to complete. The ultimate goal is similar to Bank of America’s: to make data from different business units and applications more readily available to customer service representatives.
Matt Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said that “SharePoint has been enormously popular” in other industries, but he was unaware of any other financial company using it.
Though technology companies have positioned service-oriented architecture in the past as a way to make it easier to upgrade systems while retaining legacy applications, he said that Microsoft is now “trying to make the conversation a lot more about people’s productivity.”
And though SharePoint can be used in a variety of places within a banking company, he said it is a good idea for Bank of America to focus on improving customer service.
SharePoint lets companies “build applications that take advantage of multiple back-end systems,” he said. “A lot of activities, like customer service, have to cut across those back-end services.”
Bank of America is “decoupling the clients from a lot of the advanced functionalities underneath” and tying them together with service-oriented architecture.
