Whoever succeeds Lawrence Baxter as Wachovia Corp.’s chief e-commerce officer will have a very different job, Mr. Baxter says.
Individual units at the Charlotte company will have more control over how they use the Internet, he said in a recent interview.
“It has become pretty clear that things like the business strategy for the Internet should be moved into the business units themselves,” he said.
Mr. Baxter is to retire at the end of January. The company says it will promote someone to his job this month.
Whoever gets it will help develop new online technology and be in charge of maintaining and updating the company’s intranet, but the business units will decide which projects to adopt, Mr. Baxter said.
In the early days of the Web, he said, few people understood how to use it. Back then it made sense for companies to have a single person who could figure out how to market various products and services online, he said.
But now that most people have a solid grasp of the online world, individual managers should control how their business units use the Web, Mr. Baxter said. Wachovia’s new approach will enable different units to decide how to approach customers and create a user experience that is consistent across every delivery channel, he said.
Mr. Baxter, 53, joined the old Wachovia, of Winston-Salem, N.C., 10 years ago. From a job with its chief financial officer he shortly got himself put in charge of its Web strategy.
He managed to keep that job after First Union Corp. of Charlotte bought Wachovia in 2001 and took its name.
Mr. Baxter said he was a proponent of online banking when the Internet was still mainly a toy for the tech savvy. He had used a Web browser, he said, but “frankly, I had no IT experience, and I think that was an advantage.”
Wachovia’s business executives thought of technology as something for the back office, Mr. Baxter said. He convinced them it could be a new channel for interacting with customers, he said.
“The browser sort of made the Internet accessible to nontechnologists,” Mr. Baxter said.
With Web banking now widely accepted — Wachovia has 4.3 million online banking customers — the next major evolutionary stage will be more widespread use of account aggregation services, Mr. Baxter said. These enable customers to view details from multiple accounts at multiple financial companies on a single Web page.
Customers value aggregation, he said, but today it faces the same problems as online bill payment did at first. Proving its worth is “a challenge we would like to solve, but it would take time to solve,” he said.
Though use of Wachovia’s own aggregation service has been light, he said, the company is hanging in there. Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. are among those that have pulled the plug for lack of use.
“While we’re still at a very immature stage, there will be a slow but remorseless demand for an integrated financial view,” Mr. Baxter said.
Online security will continue to be a crucial issue for online banking, he said. Though Wachovia has evaluated numerous hardware and software tools, he cautioned that criminals are always developing new ways to steal money, so bankers must keep looking for new ways to protect their customers’ deposits.
“The online-fraud question is a significant one,” he said. Wachovia should be “continually enhancing the security behind the scenes” to improve network security and fraud detection. Meanwhile, at the front end, it should strive to “give the customers a feeling of genuine security when they authenticate.”
Looking further into the future, Mr. Baxter said that the rise of broadband Internet service could lead to a new way to communicate with customers: the podcast.
The editors of The New Oxford American Dictionary recently named it their word of the year and defined it as “a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player.”
Banks and other companies may someday use the medium to deliver tutorials and other information about products, Mr. Baxter said.
He has not discussed the idea with anyone at Wachovia, he said.
Though podcasts could never replace conversation with an accountant, for example, “some of the information — perhaps half of it — is generic” and could be recorded and distributed online, he said. “I’d download that and I’d listen to it the next time I’m working out.”
Large audio files can be downloaded quickly through high-speed connections, and 80% of Wachovia’s customers now have broadband access to its site at home or at work, Mr. Baxter said. “Endless possibility comes with broadband,” he said.
“The podcast revolution is almost as big as the Internet revolution itself,” he said.
Some banks have offered Apple Computer Co.’s popular iPods as incentives to attract new customers. Citi says it has signed up tens of thousands of new online banking customers since it began handing out iPods last December, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. began offering iPods to new customers in June.
Mr. Baxter said his not sure his retirement will be permanent. He will “reboot,” he said, and “anything is possible after I’ve taken a break.”
His coworkers are afraid that the next time they see him “I’ll be a vendor,” he said.
