A modern, customer-friendly commercial banking product doesn’t necessarily have to run on the latest and greatest hardware – Wells Fargo has operated its Commercial Electronic Office (CEO) portal on an aging Hogan core banking platform for 13 years.
Key to delivering a good customer service is focusing first on the customer experience and not the product, said Steve Ellis, head of Wells Fargo Wholesale Services on the 10th anniversary.
CEO has been a work in progress since it was first developed in 1999 with quarterly updates ever since its launch.
“Every quarter on the quarter for the last 52 quarters we have put forth a new wave of functionality – new apps and enhancements to existing apps,” said Danny Peltz, executive vice president and head Wells Fargo Treasury Management. “We were the first bank to offer a single sign-on platform to provide an easy-to-use experience for our customers.”
Although much is made of the trend toward buying technology rather than building it, Wells is a firm believer in DIY when it comes to banking applications.
“I am a builder, not a buyer,” said Peltz. “We can build anything, and we have a big imagination. We chose to build rather than buy because we wanted to have an integrated solution across our applications, whether credit, FX, or wires. We wanted to make the interface consistent, and we wanted to be able to iteratively improve the platform on a continuous basis.”
The commercial division of Wells Fargo acts as an extension of its customers’ treasury operations. The banks employs an approach it calls ethnography, but instead of sending anthropologists to live in remote villages and channel Margaret Mead, its staff spends time in corporate finance operations.
“It’s not our portal, it is the customers’ portal, so we have to understand how they do their jobs,” he said. “We need to understand the user experience, how they use the apps in the portal and their workflows. In finance, all the assets are digital, so managing those digital assets with the right workflows across a diverse workforce is important.”
Today the CEO portal provides access to 80 products and services through a single sign-on.
“Each app is very deep and has integrated workflow with the bank and the customer,” Peltz said. The bank chose certain of the business apps to go mobile and built a separate front end mobile platform to support them, while linking them to the common middle and back office technology.
The CEO effort was launched as the internet was attracting growing attention and Wells Fargo decided to make a big bet on its future.
“Not everyone thought customers would be comfortable with internet financial services, but they voted by their feet and came online in droves.” Back then, he added, making that era sound like the dark ages, customers used PCs, keyboards and mice to bank online. Customers showed they wanted to do more and more online. Once they could see their financial information they also wanted to act on it. After the 9-11 attack and subsequent grounding of planes, including planes used to transport deposited checks across the country, Congress passed Check 21 which allowed banks to use images rather than physical checks to settle transactions. In November 2004, Wells Fargo started allowing customers to deposit their checks by imaging.
“We saw massive growth in online check deposits.” Now that retailer banking customers can do that with an iPhone, it is easy to forget how dramatic a change it was at the time. Image deposits allowed banks to offer their services to business across the country without worrying about having branches in each community.
Peltz said Wells Fargo was also a leader in mobile which it started to invest in back in 2006. Now he sees a large-scale movement from physical PCs to tablets and smartphones.
“Touch is a growing force in how our customers want to interact with the bank, and they use multiple form factors depending on what they are doing.”
The bank is rebuilding its platform to make the front end more consistent even as the servers tailor the interface display to each device as it recognizes them – smartphone, tablet PC, and even large screen formats. Peltz thinks that large screen displays will soon become common at work where they will be used as whiteboards or to display several types of content at once. As screens become more interactive with touch and gesture control, they will occupy a larger role in business, he said.
He doesn’t find an old Hogan system to be a problem.
“The issue is how well are your underlying systems understood by your subject matter experts, how good are you at abstracting from it, how strong is your culture around innovation and customer focus, and how fast can you iterate. I am not a proponent of boiling the ocean. Our development philosophy is very iterative – building incrementally around services as we did on mobile, CEO, and Check 21.”
Mobile is important enough that the bank has a mobile business council which crosses all the lines of business including consumer, mortgage, wealth management, brokerage, and commercial.
“We share best practices, road maps, and our learnings. Then each of us as business leaders and take what we can and applies it to our own situations.” The bank treats mobile as just another access point to its online banking services.