Allan Woods, vice chairman and chief information officer at Mellon Financial
(https://twimgs.com/wstonline/articlesArt/16101035_mellon.jpg) discusses his bank's technological future.
WS&T: How is your technology budget defined?
WOODS: We've been fairly consistent. About 12 percent of our revenue is technology expenses. When you go back over past few years, that's where it has been and that is how we anticipate it being next year as well. Half (of that budget) is infrastructure - big mainframes and networks. The other half goes to application development.
About 70 percent of total-technology spend supports our corporate and institutional services sector, the sector that houses our large processing business. It makes sense that they take the lion's share of our technology resources. The remaining 30 percent goes to our other major sector, our asset-management sector including the private-wealth-management business, Dreyfus, and all of our investment subsidiaries.
WS&T: What are some large projects that Mellon has undertaken in the past year?
WOODS: In the past year, we've developed interesting technology around straight-through processing which involved imaging, character-recognition and workflow technologies. A good example is that we have a business in our cash-management business called a lockbox business. This is a business that gets some 30 million items to be processed every month. With imaging and character recognition, 70 percent of those transactions go through without any manual intervention at all. It's also allowed us to do account-receivable conversions. We can take a company's manual paper-based check payments and convert them into automated clearing-house items. Benefits for the customer are that it gets them money faster, and, as their transactions and go through various clearing houses around the United States, if there are any rejects, they get handled first. So it clears up any funds that are in suspense very quickly. It's a very popular feature of the cash-management business.
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