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IBM has announced that Whitney National Bank, an independent business bank, is deploying IBM technologies to “integrate and speed the delivery of specialized services to its growing customer base.”

 

IBM officials say the move is intended to provide “new levels of efficiency and intelligence to both the bank and its customers.”

 

Last month TMC reported that Datamonitor said IBM won a services contract from Cigna subsidiary Lina Korea to develop a new technology platform and system for the insurance telemarketing business.

 

Whitney officials say they recognize the need to compete in today’ s dramatically altered financial playing field by using “smarter banking strategies to achieve new levels of risk control, efficiency and customer service.”

 

Bank officials say using the IBM tools, they will be able to extract key intelligence to obtain a full view of a customer’ s transaction history -- including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs -- to deliver more customized services and offerings: “Increased visibility to this account data also empowers the bank’ s customers to regulate their activities and expenses.”

 

They’ re hoping for new operational efficiencies as well, given their recent growth: “After acquiring more than a dozen banks, Whitney faced the challenge of consolidating customer information and reducing IT applications such as those supporting checking and savings account management, online bill payment and loan processing.”

In the past, if a customer requested a report of daily transactions, the information had to be pulled from a dozen different systems that could take a few days to deliver, bank officials explained, saying that has now been reduced to hours and minutes.

 

By deploying the IBM Banking Industry Framework, a portfolio of pre-built financial reports and dashboards, Whitney officials say they expect to be able to cut their banking applications in half, be able to retrieve customer information instantaneously, improve service levels by automating routine processes, reduce costs and eliminate redundancies across the enterprise.

 

Thomas “Stan” Limerick, Whitney’ s senior vice president and director of strategy and architecture, Operations & Technology Division, said the bank is also migrating to IBM Power System with DB2 in its data centers in Allen, Texas and Prattville, Alabama, adding that the new Power System enables Whitney to cut disaster recovery times between its data centers from hours to seconds.