Mellon Financial Corp. says it plans to merge three sets of online banking services in the next six to nine months that it offers to wealth management clients.
The converged system, using ACI On Demand hosted services from the vendor Transaction Systems Architects Inc., is to replace a patchwork of vendor products and home-grown applications that the Pittsburgh financial company had accumulated, Timothy Tully Jr., the chief operating officer of Mellon's private wealth management group, said Monday.
The group comprises three businesses: a legacy private wealth management business for high-net-worth clients, which Mellon retained after selling its retail banking operations in December 2001 to Citizens Financial Group; Mellon United National Bank, acquired in February 1998 and catering to high-net-worth people and small businesses; and Mellon 1st Business Bank, acquired in 1997 as a lender to small and midsize businesses in California.
"There are a lot of similarities in the operations, but there are a lot of nuances," he said. "That's why we didn't build it ourselves. It would take too long to deliver the flexibility to that broad customer set."
He said that Mellon, which is to merge with Bank of New York Co. Inc. around July 1, plans to start the systems mergers on the West Coast and move eastward, beginning with clients of Mellon 1st in August.
(The operational merger of the two banking companies' systems won't occur before 2008.)
Mellon's corporate clients will gain features such as batch import of wire transfers, Mr. Tully said. Mellon also plans to integrate the ACI business banking service with a homegrown application, called its Private Work Bench portal, that it also will roll out this summer.
The company plans to integrate the two by yearend, he said, so that clients can "move across our spectrum of services without feeling like they are dealing with different organizations."
Transaction Systems, a New York technology company, said Mellon is the first named customer for its hosted service since it bought P&H Solutions Inc. in Newton, Mass., last October, though a spokesman said the company has signed up other financial customers.
