Wachovia Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. are working on a system they say will accomplish something that has been elusive in banking technology: provide every business unit with the same information about customers.
Joe Monk, Wachovia’s chief information officer for retail channel technology, said the heart of the effort is an IBM-built “integration hub” that is to serve as a centralized data storehouse available to bank employees.
Wachovia and IBM have been working on the project for two years. Mr. Monk said Monday that it could take another two years to complete, though some elements are already in place.
Rusty Wiley, IBM’s global banking industry leader for business consulting services, said banks have long sought a “common information repository” to provide better customer service and boost sales.
Many banks’ units are launched as independent lines of business and often use different applications to store and access customer data. Banks have realized that merging and sharing this information can be difficult. (This problem tends to be more pronounced at large companies whose acquisitions came with the sellers’ own core banking systems.)
IBM is using service-oriented architecture to connect the repository with banking applications. Service-oriented architecture refers to applications that interoperate but are not dependent on one another. In the Wachovia system, it would enable users of a range of applications, such as teller software and call center software, to view and update the same information stored in the data repository.
IBM completed the repository last June, and Wachovia developed in-house the first applications to access the repository last year, Mr. Wiley said. IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., is developing additional applications for the Charlotte company and expects them to be ready in nine to 12 months.
Previously this sort of project would not have been possible. “The service-oriented architecture technology that exists today didn’t exist four years ago,” Mr. Wiley said.
But there are other reasons banks have been unable to implement this type of system, he said, including some unit managers’ reluctance to share their information. “The bank has to have a new governance model,” he said.
This type of cooperation is unusual in banking, Mr. Monk said, but all of Wachovia’s managers support the effort. In February, at a conference hosted by IBM, he said, “It’s the first time I’ve seen IT and business come together in an essentially holistic way.”
Before Wachovia can hook all of its systems into the IBM data storehouse, Mr. Monk said Monday, it must complete its conversion to Internet banking software from Corillian Corp. of Hillsboro, Ore., and its conversion to online bill payment software from CheckFree Corp. of Atlanta.
Mr. Monk said that once the two online banking upgrades are complete, Wachovia plans to connect either its branch software or its call center software to the data repository.
George Tubin, a senior analyst at MasterCard International’s TowerGroup Inc. in Needham, Mass., called Wachovia’s project “a very, very big deal.”
He said that if a customer started filling out an application online, the information could be stored within the hub and accessed from the call center if the customer wanted to finish it later by phone, Mr. Tubin said.
“The customer service aspect of it is huge,” he said, as is the potential cost savings to the bank.
Accessing of information tends to vary by bank channel, Mr. Tubin said. “Most customers are multichannel users,” so “having consistency across the channels is very important from a customer service standpoint,” he said.
