Change in situaition

EastCo Bank was an outstanding regional bank of the 20-th century. However, the late 90s
• saw more intense competition from the national banks as well as
• smaller regional banks
that could provide a high level of personalized customer service.

In the recent years, EastCo Bank has also purchased a number of local banks. While this increased the number of clients, its actual problem became the inability of communication among the too many new back-end systems.

• EastCo Bank's own back-end systems and the incompatible with them databases that were added, represented a problem for customer service.
• The bank had no effective means of clients information unification and key clients indication.

Therefore, the bank managers concentrated on separate accounts instead of "complete" clients which made the top clients change the bank in search for better customer service.

EastCo Bank invested significantly in public post for customer feedback, market and client analysis.

• Many of its web-experienced small-sized customers required online bank transactions.
• EastCo Bank recognized it that it should take care of its clients providing them with self-service functionality.

Bank EastCo needed a technological strategy that would increase the information capacity in their existing systems, that could rationalize financial reports, deliver on its own and in due time relevant client information to bank managers and customers, allow and improve online bank transactions and information flow to small and commercial clients and partners.

A portal, constructed via Sequoia's XML portal server (XPS), allows EastCo Bank to improve its legacy and proprietary systems as well as to integrate its own systems and expand their available capacity.
XPS makes the business processes automatic and provides users with an individual access point including both to external financial contents and internal systems.

Through a personalized work place
• bank officials
• bank clients and
• bank partners
can now have an access to:
• bank accounts
• Legacy Systems, such as Siebel or Lawson
• their own systems
• relevant Internet sites, such as Reuters or FinanCenter
• company news, brochures, data, guidelines and conduct an individual search.

Personification

• Directors of the bank now use the portal to access the client information and to produce financial reports. They use the reports to take better financial decisions and to use the within the period stipulated and relevant client information for the improvement of customer service and the establishment of more loyal relationships with clients and partners.

• The EastCo Bank headquarters also use the portal to daily distribute urgent news and business information to the branches. This reduces the costs spent on weekly newsletter for the employees and the daily faxes to the senior management.

• EastCo Bank clients can now, among other things:
• coordinate check accounts
• make transfers
• make capital transfers
• order checks
• trade online

...

To make easier the contact for the clients using Internet on everyday basis, XPS provides a friendly browser interface.

XPS helps the bank employees
• to approach the clients' demands in a better way,
• to rationalize the employees' time and
• to cut the vast amount of paper work.
Addressing these requirements EastCo Bank can keep the clients and thus contribute to attaining the shareholders' goal, i.e. profit maximization.

Since EastCo Bank is expanding in mergers and acquisitions direction, XPS can be so scalable that it would operate in the whole company, among many other things, allowing
• key persons to be integrated in different processes
• different departments to work together
• to rationalize the ways of departments conversion
• to improve communication among departments and clients / partners.

In the future, EastCo Bank hopes to be able to expand its mission with goals including development of the long-term relationships and satisfying clients' needs, providing them with an access to all their financial accounts. This can be reached only through partnership with other financial institutions that offer portal-based services. XPS, therefore, enables one to build such partnerships in an easier way.