Word of wikis is spreading beyond the under-25 crowd these days, with blue chips like IBM and Disney relying on them as part of their community-building marketing efforts. But adoption of wikis-Web sites supported by software that allows even the least tech-savvy users to create and edit Web-page content-has been slower in financial services as institutions experiment first with internal implementations that foster easy collaboration among team members.
Perhaps the most famous wiki on the Internet is Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that hosts more than 1.7 million articles in English on topics from molecular electronics to the insurgency in Somalia. Bankers may have run across Investopedia, the ad-sponsored site that covers the financial markets.
Wells Fargo, known for its embrace of Web 2.0 technologies-including virtual reality games and customer blogs-has adopted wikis for a variety of internal uses, primarily searching for ways to improve communication among teams in disparate locations. "I'm a pretty big believer that there are lots of different ways to communicate," says Danny Peltz, evp of wholesale Internet and treasury solutions at Wells Fargo. "You need to continue to look forward to new technology to support the growing dispersion of business-unit intelligence."
When it comes to wikis, Peltz has offered the collaborative technology across his group, but found only the technical teams embracing it. "Conceptually, wikis make a lot of sense," he says, but "the tools we've seen in the market are not quite as easy to use as I'd like to see." In other words, business analysts aren't as comfortable with the user interfaces offered by some wiki vendors-some of which require simple coding-as say, a development group might be.
But some wiki vendors have advanced their technology to the point where the least tech-savvy bank executives can make changes. At Rock Island, IL-based MWA bank, a unit of the insurer Modern Woodmen of America, the entire customer-facing Web site is actually powered by wiki software from CustomerVision. MWA's use of wiki software doesn't allow customers to modify or edit pages, but it did allow the bank to fire its outside Web site vendor in favor of letting employees update the Website when rates or fees change. "Just being able to cancel that contract because our people could do it internally was a great savings for us," says Steven J. Ollenburg, president and CEO of MWA Bank.
That's just what Cindy Rockwell had in mind when she left Wells Fargo-she was a national vp for cross-selling-to found CustomerVision. She believed there was a gap in financial firms' ability to share their intellectual capital. Now MWA Bank uses its wiki to do just that: It's created a comprehensive knowledge base that's easily searchable by keyword. "Say you're looking for a one-pager on 'How do I open a bank account?'" Rockwell says. "Instead of being buried in a document-management system, now within the wiki I can quickly do a search on 'open account' and find it."
The knowledge repository has also dramatically lowered training costs and allows MWA Bank's small cross-functional staff to reduce interruptions, Ollerson says. And the same knowledge base has been used to provide automated responses to a large portion of incoming customer email. "We're easily saving in the six-figure range in employee time and [reduced] Web costs per year," Ollerson says.
Like Peltz's unit at Wells Fargo, investment-research firm Manning & Napier Advisors uses wiki technology to facilitate communication between dispersed group members. Manning & Napier used wiki technology from vendor Socialtext to build a comprehensive database that is "much more searchable than a bunch of word documents stored on 12 people's computers," says Jeff Herrmann, co-director of research for Manning & Napier.
In addition, the wiki has cut the time to compile Manning & Napier analysts' monthly stock updates into a publishable form. Before analysts were required to submit their one-pagers at the end of the month, and a research assistant spent two days assembling all the documents into the appropriate format. Now analysts update the wiki whenever something changes with a stock, and the assistant spends about 20 minutes finalizing the document, Herrmann says. But even at Manning & Napier, full wiki access is limited to 40 people in the research department. Allowing employees throughout the firm to access some of the data contained there would raise regulatory concerns, Herrmann says.
All of these highly successful wiki implementations in financial-services companies are for internal collaboration and training use only. That's not much of a surprise. "Financial institutions are still on the learning curve of understanding how to use it," Rockwell says. "They're transactional-based, and this is really communication-based technology."
Will Bank of America ever see a benefit to IBM and Oracle's wiki strategy, with totally open customer wikis that allow entry to all comers? Most industry observers say no. "As a customer of IBM, whatever I say about a product, nobody's going to care," Rockwell says. "But what I say about a checking account, I see that as being way more damaging."
