JPMorgan Chase & Co. took its online banking system down Sunday, and when it came back up Monday it included some features plucked from bankone.com.
"We looked at the two sites and said, 'What have we got that can offer the best of both worlds?' " said Tom Kelly, a JPMorgan Chase spokesman.
Customers using chase.com can now use features such as paperless statements and voice alerts, which were brought over Monday from bankone.com. In the fall, when bankone.com users are switched to chase.com, they will find features they do not have now, such as a way to initiate wire transfers online.
JPMorgan Chase, of New York, bought Bank One, of Chicago, last year.
Mr. Kelly said that switching bankone.com users to chase.com will not be seamless. For example, any former Bank One customer who has the same online-banking user name as a chase.com customer will have to pick a new one. In addition, people who use personal financial management software to access their old Bank One bank accounts from home will need to change the settings.
Indeed, the chase.com site was unavailable for a few hours Tuesday for "fine-tuning," Mr. Kelly said.
JPMorgan Chase's credit card site has been down since July 20 and is due to come back up this week. Customers got advance notice of the extended card-site shutdown but not of the short online-banking shutdown, Mr. Kelly said.
Like JPMorgan Chase, Wachovia Corp. has tweaked wachovia.com in preparation for bringing over customers now using southtrust.com. (Wachovia bought SouthTrust Corp., of Birmingham, Ala., in November.)
Southtrust.com allows customers to log in from the home page. Wachovia.com did not; hitting a login link brought the user to a page with alternative logins for customers of the old Wachovia, of Winston-Salem, N.C., and of the former First Union Corp. of Charlotte, which bought it in 2001 and took its name.
In April, Wachovia eliminated the choice and put the username and password fields on its home page.
Unlike JPMorgan Chase, Citizens Financial Group Inc. of Providence, R.I., junked voice alerts in a system integration last month.
Citizens, a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC, bought Charter One Financial Inc., of Cleveland, last August. About 2,500 Charter One customers had been getting the voice alerts; Citizens suggested that they sign up for e-mail alerts instead.
George Tubin, a senior analyst at TowerGroup Inc., a Needham, Mass., unit of MasterCard International, said the fact that JPMorgan Chase was using online banking software from the same vendor as Bank One may have helped it mix features.
The vendor is Corillian Corp. of Hillsboro, Ore. "They're integrating a platform from the same provider," Mr. Tubin said. "They're going from Corillian to Corillian."
Still, a lot of thought must have gone into which features to keep and which to drop, if any, he said.
"The goal in every merger is to never take anything away," Mr. Tubin said.
Chris Musto, a vice president for research at Watchfire GomezPro in Waltham, Mass., said such questions will become more common in future bank mergers because online banking is becoming more widely used.
"In the early years, if two banks merged, they could just put people on one system or the other," he said. But today the services available online are more complex, and one bank's offerings may be quite different from another's.
At Citizens, Mr. Musto said, voice alerts could be dropped because relatively few people used them.
Mr. Tubin said eliminating more popular services, online or offline, can lead to ill will. He noted that after Bank of America Corp. purchased FleetBoston Financial Corp. in 2003, it dropped a popular Fleet service: selling stamps through automated teller machines.
The service "was really a bear to manage," Mr. Tubin said, but dropping it "certainly wasn't looked on very well by a lot of customers."
