Synovus Financial Corp. says it has saved money and improved its customers' experience by integrating a growing array of in-house and outsourced data processing systems.
The $31.3 billion-asset Columbus, Ga., banking company recently completed an upgrade to link its master customer information system and its Internet banking system.
"We cut out about 50 manual processes that we had had when we were in a batch environment," said John Woolbright, Synovus' chief technology officer. The upgrade not only streamlined workflow for employees but also improved customers' ability to gain access to multiple accounts through a single sign-on and positioned the company to move more quickly to expand the capabilities of its 40 separately chartered community banks.
Synovus now plans to integrate the customer information system with its loan origination systems for consumers and some small commercial borrowers next year or in early 2008, Mr. Woolbright said, and to tie in campaign analytics to monitor its marketing efforts.
The bank has worked since 2002 with the consulting and professional services unit of Metavante Corp., the technology subsidiary of the Milwaukee banking company Marshall & Ilsley Corp. Earlier efforts focused on connecting such applications as deposit-account opening and sales-tracking systems, provided by S1 Corp. of Atlanta, with its core processing platform, which is hosted by Metavante.
The integrations use technologies such as service-oriented architecture and extensible markup language, or XML, which supply standard interfaces to connect different systems, Mr. Woolbright said, and this speeds development efforts. "Things that would take years now take days," he said.
The staff training component "may be one of the hardest aspects of it," he said. The improved information can tell a branch representative that "this is a four-star customer based on the data we have," he said. "What do we want to do differently based on that?"
