OneBank

I used to bank with many banks. I still do - only now they're all called OneBank. I'm supposed to be their preferred customer. Maybe that's why they think I'm the perennial globe trotting kind - my mortgage reminders go to Milwaukee, my dividend payments reach Detroit and my credit card statements land up in Chicago. But I'm not complaining. Sully May, my mortgage company, was recently acquired by OneBank, and has since been undercharging interest to the tune of 50 basis points to my mortgage account each month. Freeman Kubrick Inc, my private banker, now a wholly owned subsidiary of OneBank, blesses my account with the same dividends twice and sometimes even thrice if it's my lucky quarter. Despite consecutive defaults on card payments, my provider NapEx, another OneBank buy, still considers me a privileged user - my family got an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii, rewards courtesy NapEx.

To the regular Joe, these would've passed off as innovative customer retention strategies, but being a technology consultant, it was obvious to me that OneBank was struggling to harness the synergies of its own growth. Technology lagging the Business led to larger losses quarter after quarter. That apart, OneBank was facing flak from various regulatory bodies over gross non-compliance. Well past the identity verification deadline, OneBank had verified just 34% of its account-holders. It had already been in the dock for lack of transparency in operations and the latest furore was around its inadequate anti-money laundering systems and policies - recent arrests of the Al-Wahida (Arabic for "The One" - coincidence?) terrorist outfit had revealed that huge placement and layering transactions thru OneBank had gone virtually undetected.

What would surprise many was that OneBank had not exactly been penny pinching on its IT budget either. A cursory look at their P & L statement reveals that they had spent more on technology than the cumulative tech spend of their two biggest competitors. So where did all the money go - one would be tempted to ask. OneBank had definitely been spending with a large heart but what they needed to do was spend smart. In the last financial year, OneBank had spent millions of dollars on piecemeal custom projects that were supposed to integrate systems of their latest acquisition targets with the original bank entity. Ill-advised by boutique consulting firms, they had run up huge new hardware expenses and disposed off existing systems at nominal recovery prices. Their big bang IT strategy tried to do too many things all at once and quite expectedly misfired. One common thread to all IT decisions at OneBank was that technology initiatives were always an afterthought once the business had taken its course.

Sounds like I've been overly critical of OneBank's IT strategy so far. They did take one right decision after all - they hired our firm, finally. We helped OneBank realize the benefits of their inorganic growth, building synergies by tapping the unique strengths of each new acquisition. Standardization was the key to extracting the best out of diversity, hence we used a service based approach. All existing IT investments were leveraged as services, not only simplifying the integration but also lending much needed flexibility to IT. These services could also be reused to support a new business process or a modified existing one. The idea was to align technology with the ever-changing and ever-growing business and make it more responsive. Our approach to a service-oriented enterprise was more evolutionary than revolutionary, and OneBank reaped the benefits of its investments in each iteration rather than pumping money into a black hole. In fact, the latest acquisition, Futura, a futures and commodity trading company, has been successfully "seamlessly" integrated to OneBank with minimal effort. OneBank's CIO is very happy but I'm sad I'll miss my Hawaii vacation this year.