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[Introduction]
[Mohan Sankararaman, system manager, electronic payments division, Wachovia]
What we’re doing here at Wachovia is helping us take a quantum leap in the electronic payments industry.
[Christopher Ward, senior vice president, business line manager for payables and receivables, Wachovia.]
About Wachovia
Wachovia is the fourth largest financial institution in the United States with over 700 billion in assets. We have branches throughout the U.S. to service our consumer customers as well as corporate customers. And we also have 44 offices overseas in foreign countries as well as eight branches overseas that we use to process, payments and transactions for our corresponding banks.
[Mohan Sankararaman, system manager, electronic payments division, Wachovia]
Payments is a core service that a bank provides that helps us move money in and out of a bank on request by either a consumer or a corporation or by another bank.
The payments process to Wachovia is extremely important. It’s a very large portion of the banks’ revenue stream as well as growth for the future, and we view this need to be able to be flexible and dynamic in the payments business because we are trying to integrate with our customers as they try to automate their financial supply chain.
[Leigh Ferrante, Managing Director, Information Technology, Wachovia]
In the past, our payment systems were segregated, dated. Point-to-point integration. Change was very challenging. We weren’t flexible. We couldn’t be nimble and react to speed to market. ...
[Innovation]
Innovation at Wachovia is providing new capabilities both in speed and uniqueness to the client solutions that are otherwise viewed as a commodity business.
Innovation can be anything that is new, brings best of breed, best of service to our customers. It could be a small change. It could just be a process change. It is anything that makes us think outside of the box, and be unique and differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.
[Challenge]
Business strategies are quickly becoming technology strategies because we’re converting payment transactions from paper to electronic and we’re needing to be more tightly integrated with our clients to enable them to make their electronic payments.
We at Wachovia we felt we had three opportunities. The first one was to integrate different payment systems together. Two, the ability to track a payment throughout its lifecycle start to finish. Three the ability to deliver services quickly to the market.
Our challenge was, when the payment protocol changes, we have to make those changes to a wide variety of systems. Our cost went up because we have to test and deliver those across a wide variety of systems and also our processing platform was becoming more and more complex.
[Solution]
IBM helped us implement a solution that we call, Payment Broker. This solution helps us transform, route and track a payment throughout its lifecycle.
It has allowed us to be able to separate the front-end payment origination systems from the back-end payment settlement systems. In addition to being able to build out services that each of those can call and reuse.
This SOA-based solution is made up of WebSphere Message Broker, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 database, all running on System P servers and supported by IBM Software Services.
[Why IBM ]
IBM’s knowledge and expertise in the payments space was critical to our success. It was important to me that IBM already knew this was an important space and already made investments.
The IBM Dublin lab had already developed a very robust payments asset that was far more robust and superior than what we would have done in-house, and it helped us bring the solution to market a lot-lot quicker.
IBM’s service-oriented architecture leadership was critical to our decision in partnering with them. It really leads straight into the strategy that we are trying to achieve at the bank in building out services across our payment platforms.
[Benefits]
This new solution will help us offer new services to our customers; it will improve our decision-making process; it’ll give us greater control on the payments flowing through the systems.
We’ve seen a 50 percent reduction in time and cost it takes us to modify or upgrade or integrate new interfaces into our payment infrastructure…
[Closing]
This solution has, and will continue to be, a foundation in our payments space. It is allowing us to have greater insight in a central place to all our payments, and that is really invoking innovation in the types of services that we’re able to provide to our customers.
The business comes to me with cool ideas and dreams. Now, with this new solution, I know, I can say yes and make them a reality in a timely fashion.
The most exciting part of this effort is we’ve taken very complex payments platform and made it simply elegant, that enables us to provide unique solutions to our customers as well as adding value added services that our clients are willing to pay for and grow our revenue at Wachovia.
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Produced in the United States of America
12-07
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