Banking On IBM Industry Expertise

IBM has been relentlessly focused in recent weeks on the opportunity the smarter planet initiative presents to assist businesses in industry-specific contexts.

At Lotusphere in January, Lotus introduced its collaboration framework, which provided specific collaboration-oriented guidance across several industry-specific areas.

Last week in Las Vegas, IBM’s Mike Rhodin did the same for the integrated service management sector at IBM Pulse 2010.

Today, IBM announced that Whitney National Bank, with $12 billion in assets, has become a new banking customer and one that is utilizing IBM’s recently announced banking industry framework.

To compete in today’s dramatically altered financial playing field, banks must employ smarter banking strategies to achieve new levels of risk control, efficiency and customer service.

Whitney National Bank is using IBM technology across its regional banks to simplify its business practices, meet regulatory compliance and ensure transparency with customers.

Whitney can now extract key intelligence to obtain a full view of a customer’s transaction history — including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs — to deliver more customized services and offerings. Increased visibility to this account data also empowers the bank’s customers to regulate their activities and expenses.

With industry consolidation, the number one priority of banks is to be able to assess liquidity.

After acquiring more than a dozen regional banks, Whitney National Bank faced the challenge of consolidating customer information and a host of disparate IT systems for checking and savings account management, online bill payment and loan processing.

Whitney National Bank is using IBM Cognos software to extract key intelligence to help it obtain a full view of its customer bases' behavior, including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs, so it can deliver more customized services and offerings.

By integrating data from disparate IT systems, Whitney has been able to modernize its technology systems across regional branches to better manage risk and enhance customer service.

By using IBM’s Banking Industry Frameworks, Whitney National Bank is able to leverage pre-built industry-proven data and process models already employed by more than 250 financial institutions.

The bank is also migrating to IBM Power System with DB2 in its data centers in Allen, Texas and Prattville, Alabama.

Whitney National Bank is the latest example of how the right combination of hardware and software can be fine-tuned to meet the specific demands of banks.