The system prevents salespeople and executives from appearing ill-informed when dealing with clients. In one instance prior to its deployment, bank staff told a New York executive, preparing to call on an Italian company, that the bank had no relationship with the company. In a meeting with the company's U.S. finance arm, the executive learned that Bank of New York, in fact, was already managing bonds for its Luxembourg division and pension assets for its U.K. division. With the new system, the executive would have been able to locate online records of those relationships, which came from bank acquisitions.
Gerald Wellesley, a managing director who heads the bank's European corporate-banking unit in London, says knowledge of existing relationships lets his five-person team offer complementary products and services. "It's very satisfying, speaking as someone with a lot of client contact, to feel that well informed," Wellesley says.
The system gives Bank of New York an edge on competitors. Many financial-services companies are working to centralize customer data, but few have achieved that goal, TowerGroup analyst Jerry Silva says. "It's usually difficult enough to bring together the customer information within an organization, much less across [international] borders," he says. That involves navigating each country's infrastructure limitations, language and cultural differences, privacy laws, and other legal considerations. Bank of New York mitigated some of those challenges by including European and Asian steering committees in the software selection, design, and rollout of the system.
Moreover, sales and product groups can be possessive of their client information. The bank motivates employees worldwide to update customer information by tying commissions and expense-account reimbursements to such efforts.
Another big challenge, VP of technology Dave Moran says, came from the complex task of gathering customer data from so many locations and then cleaning it up, by removing errors or duplications, so it could be included in the consolidated system.
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