01 September 2005 Features

 

Case Study: Wells Fargo Wholesale Banking

The Wholesale Banking group at Wells Fargo serves middle-market and large corporate businesses with traditional and asset-based lending, treasury management, equipment leasing, institutional investment, insurance brokerage, risk management, and real estate services. In 2000, it deployed its online Commercial Electronic Office portal providing business customers with consolidated, self-service access to over 30 banking services, including credit management, foreign exchange, investments and treasury services. As part of their progression to an SOA, the IT group migrated the existing CEO portal, originally built on a BEA WebLogic server, to the new SOA foundation which included BEA WebLogic Portal as the user presentation layer.

Danny Peltz, executive vice president and head of wholesale internet solutions at Wells Fargo, says: “We built the CEO portal as a single sign-on to all the different financial services that we offer our wholesale banking clients. What we are attempting to do for our customers is to create a simplified experience which allows them to seamlessly move from one service to another while presenting a common face of Wells Fargo to the customer.”

“One of the reasons we went with service oriented architecture is to further enhance the user experience. The reason being is that if we can create some common components that we can share between all the different applications and services we give to the customers, the better the experience is going to be. Because we have a very customer centric focus in our development efforts, we meet our customers on a regular basis both in terms of usability sessions and delivery councils and we get a lot of requests for what I call ‘same type functionality’ across applications and services. SOA has enabled us to build particular services in a rapid fashion,” says Peltz.

Changing the culture within the organisation was a challenge. “I think that we will continue as it makes sense. Part of this is a cultural change in the way that you build things, so I have a technology group and a business group that focuses on ‘shared surfaces’. They determine from a customer perspective what makes sense and from a technical perspective what makes sense, and then they send their findings and recommendations on agreed upon migrations of SOA components,” continues Peltz.