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5 Critical Tactics In The Wells Fargo-Wachovia Integration

Few IT shops will ever work on a project as big as this historic banking acquisition. But some tactics Wells Fargo used make sense for smaller scale mergers and consolidation projects.

For three long years beginning in late 2008, every Friday morning meant a conference call for about 100 Wells Fargo IT leaders. The topic: how to keep the technology integration of the largest bank merger in U.S. history on track.

The $15 billion Wells Fargo acquisition of Wachovia would leave the combined entities with more than 70 million customer accounts. It involved converting 3,088 Wachovia retail branches to Wells Fargo branding. It meant connecting Wells and Wachovia systems used to run 80 very different lines of business--from mortgage lending and credit cards to brokerage accounts and business loans.

And it meant eliminating half of the major IT platforms used to run the business. That's the Wells Fargo way in an acquisition--move the legacy operation onto a single system and shut down the old one; don't let overlapping technologies run alongside each other.

Martin Davis, who came from Wachovia and was tapped to lead the tech integration, led those Friday meetings with just three standing agenda items:

1. What are the lessons that were learned from recent implementations?

2. What's due to get done in the next 30 days?

3. Which problems might keep those things from getting done in the next 30 days?

Here's an example of a lesson learned. Marketing-wise, Wells Fargo wanted to move Wachovia customers to the Wells Fargo brand as quickly as possible. So when it was ready to convert a geographic area to the Wells Fargo brand, the plan was to mail each Wachovia customer a debit card with the Wells Fargo name.

But customers weren't expecting the mailing, and too many of them didn't respond by activating their new accounts. So Wells Fargo execs decided to stop issuing new cards en masse and instead let all existing cards continue to work and replace them as they expired.

That kind of business decision meant a new IT plan. Instead of systems accepting one type of card, they would need to let the Wells Fargo consumer banking systems accept legacy Wachovia cards for an extended period.

False starts are always unpleasant, but thankfully the bank decided to reverse course when it had only about 20,000 customers converting cards, Davis says, since it realized the problem during a fairly small early rollout.

Next: A Long, Hard Climb

To read the entire original article, visit InformationWeek. Chris Murphy is editor of InformationWeek and co-chair of the InformationWeek Conference. He has been covering technology leadership and CIO strategy issues for InformationWeek since 1999. Before that, he was editor of the Budapest Business Journal, a business newspaper in ... View Full Bio

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