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Bank Systems & Technology: The Blog

« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »

If you think that I'm not qualified to dish out advice about selling because I am only a technology consultant, think again. My very first business venture at age 10 went through a rude awakening that I was able to overcome for one simple reason: I learned how to sell.

As we reported in this week's Bank Monitor Update (subscription required), Wells Fargo recently announced a new service that will allow customers to store electronic documents within their Wells Fargo online account. This new service, called vSafe, is supposed to allow customers to store "virtually any popular file format (e.g. Word documents, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, photos, audio and video files)"; includes predefined folders such as "Medical", "Legal" and "Family" and customers can customize their own folders; and will allow customers to automatically upload their Wells Fargo bank statements.

In my usual morning perusal of news items, I ran across this post from The Bellwether Daily, a blog that proclaims itself the source of "Midwest news they seem to lose," "they" being the mainstream news media. In it, blogger Bill Sloat describes a lawsuit Dayton, Ohio-based NCR has filed against a former employee, now at Hewlett-Packard, around trade secrets. NCR maintains that the ex-vice president of the company who left NCR for HP intends to leak information pertaining to the ATM giant's financial services practice and other key areas.

By Joseph Salesky, ClairMail Inc.

In theory, alerts can be an effective customer service tool for fraud prevention, account management, bill payment and other banking functions. When executed correctly, not only can alerts increase customer service and satisfaction, they can also significantly cut costs for banks, introduce new revenue opportunities and accelerate adoption of the mobile banking channel.

First, I should tell you I have a relationship with two ladies at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, DC. It started on May 21, 1999. I initiated the relationship by sending a general letter to the SEC about who I am, what I do, and a whole lotta claims of my innocence regarding what I know and don't know about a handful of public companies. I have six letters in the file from two ladies acknowledging my disclosures. They were not form letters. Each letter had a serial number. They told me how my letters would be distributed to interested parties within the SEC. You'll be happy to know this is your government at work—very efficient, very accountable and very responsive.

With all the talk of "green" this and "green" that, it's interesting when a figures from a survey such as the one by InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, show that paper is still "in" with consumers. Granted, the report might be a little self-serving. InfoPrint is, after all, a printer and software solutions company. However, I still think the numbers are worth a look.

When potential clients first visit a bank’s Web site, they are often presented with a myriad of choices regarding the types and styles of deposit accounts they might open with the firm. Indeed, if you look just at checking options Citibank has 6 types of accounts, JPMorgan Chase has 4 (not including student accounts), and Bank of America has five types of checking accounts. And this is just checking. If you include savings and CDs, the number of account options become overwhelming.

My bookcase contains 22 past editions of Automation in Banking. The 23rd is still in the oven. The 22 are dog-eared because I have had to refer to them many times to answer questions from very intelligent readers who had a need to know. Last week I read the 1985 Edition, and here are some highlights that got my attention:

What do soon-to-be-former Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York and Societe General’s rogue trader Jerome Kerviel have in common? It appears that an understanding of bank risk management systems and regulatory requirements was something that both men were able to exploit, but also something that proved to be their respective undoings.

We received an email recently from PayPal inviting us to download their new plug-in, which streamlines the payment process at websites. However, this is not simply an auto-fill tool for forms like RoboForm. In fact, it allows you to use your PayPal account for purchases at any site that accepts MasterCard - even if the site you are purchasing from does not accept PayPal. This new Secure Card feature allows users to generate one-time MasterCard numbers for use in purchasing a product once, or a multiple-use number for repeat purchases at the same vendor.

It's numbers crunching season again for me, and my outlook has been confirmed as if a combined team of Big Four auditors ripped through my databases looking for errors, omissions and even fraudulent opinions.

A trend among consumers in recent years has been to pay their taxes with a credit card. I know this is old news in a way, but whenever I see something about topic, I can't help but shake my head and wonder why!

Well, Apple finally did it. The iPhone is officially ready to be transformed into an enterprise application. On Thursday, the Mac maker announced it will offer full support for Microsoft's Exchange corporate server. This will enable Apple to bring push capabilities for e-mail, contacts, address lists, and other enterprise-grade features via a software update in June. This includes security features as well, like remote wipe, support for Cisco IPsec VPN, certificates, identities and WPA2/802.11x support.

Forgive me folks, but half of what I learned about human behavior came from the lyrics of pop and country music: Thus, the first part of the title of this blog.

I have always empathized with sales guys. They have the toughest job in our business because they are in the front lines, often alone, their audience is the enemy, and to make matters worse, they are constantly nagged by the win or lose outcome of their efforts--nothing in between. This story is about helping a rookie sales guy who left the confines of the brain trust territory to sell a technology in the land of "The Big Easy."

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