A year after going to an Internet system to give its wholesale bankers a unified view of customer accounts, Wells Fargo & Co. has started a rollout of a similar system for employees who serve its online retail and brokerage customers.
Wells said the new portal, which was pilot tested in December, should improve call-center service and cross-sales. It especially wants better interdepartmental collaboration in serving wealthier customers.
Danny Peltz, the executive vice president of the San Francisco company's wholesale Internet and treasury solutions, said that cross-selling is easier when employees have complete information and easier access to it.
"The strategy is obvious when you say it out loud," he said, but creating a system to support cross-selling was a challenge.
To a greater extent than many banks, Wells uses cross-selling statistics as a measure of its business performance. In reporting fourth-quarter earnings this week, it said cross-sales reached a record of 4.6 products per consumer, versus about three in 1998.
One reason bank salespeople have struggled to make use of customer-relationship technologies is that the industry traditionally has segregated its offerings by product-line silos. Some industry watchers say Wells is ahead of many of its large rivals in this respect.
Chris Musto, a research vice president at the market research firm Watchfire GomezPro in Waltham, Mass., said: "Sometimes the customers' view of the financial relationship with the company, the bank, is more complete than the customer service representatives'. Wells Fargo has tried to get away from that."
Wells retail customers have been using a single sign-on to access several different banking and brokerage accounts since 2001. Many of its competitors require separate sign-ons for banking, brokerage, credit card, and mortgage accounts, Mr. Musto said. Single sign-on, he said, fosters "a holistic financial relationship that transcends the difference between banking and brokerage."
Wells, which is ranked the No. 1 Internet bank by Watchfire, announced the rollout of the retail portal Wednesday in conjunction with the introduction of an enhanced brokerage site, with improved navigation, a new pricing scheme, and client access to online tools such as mutual fund ratings from Morningstar Inc. of Chicago.
Teddy De Rivera, a senior vice president at Wells and its head of online customer service, said the full rollout is to be completed by midyear to the 600 employees in its online customer service centers. In those centers the system is called the "OCS Desktop Portal," Mr. De Rivera said.
The retail portal uses the same service-oriented architecture that Wells uses for employees and customers of its Commercial Electronic Office. It came out with that browser-based product for its corporate clients last January.
The CEO portal gives commercial clients consolidated self-service access to more than 30 banking services, including treasury management, credit and loans, foreign exchange, institutional investing, and insurance. Employees use an internal version, called I-CEO.
"I-CEO is exactly what we wanted to be able to do on the consumer side, so we can serve customers when, where, and how they want to be served," Mr. De Rivera said in an interview Wednesday. "You have to look at it from the customer perspective. We didn't want to compartmentalize ourselves."
The retail portal uses the same account-integration system as the commercial version, the WebLogic Platform 8.1 from BEA Systems Inc. of San Jose.
"The portal is the last piece of the service-oriented architecture, because it's the way you present that information," Mr. De Rivera said.
He said the integrated system should aid cross-sales by presenting more comprehensive information to the bankers, including those in its online customer service centers. Wells estimated the first deployment saved 10 minutes per banker per day.
At its simplest level, the portal should show representatives "the next best action to take with that particular customer," Mr. De Rivera said. "It could be something as simple as a 'thank you.' "
Mr. Peltz said better integration and information-sharing could be especially helpful to employees who work with the high-income customers of Wells' private-client services group. For instance, he said, it would be easier for a personal banker to communicate with specialists from the brokerage and trust areas.
