Integration for the Four Giant Banks-Signage Changed, but Systems a Work in Progress

This is the third in a series of blogs about the risks of IT reliability at the "too big to..." banks.Funny that I should be a customer of the four giant U.S. banks. Twenty-five percent of my relationships was deliberate. I entered BofA through the front door. The other 75 percent came to me through the M&A door. I'm not complaining. It's a blogger's dream come true. For example:

• The signs at the WaMu branches in Dallas have been changed. But I still can't make my mortgage payments at an original Chase branch. Nice goin' marketing guy.

• I pay my Citi credit card bill every month at a branch. My BofA branch is only a few blocks away, but there's a day-delay debit on my BofA account. Citi does so much offshoring that who knows how many servers my transaction has to transgress to get to BofA's Charlotte, or Dallas, or Concord processing centers. Check 21 was a good thing (replacing air, ground and pony couriers), as long as the electronic networks can handle the heavy load. You heard of black out, brown out, grid out, web crash, database crash, and volume crunch? I'm feeling "net out," of the fiber and satellite kind. I'm glad you got a makeover, Hubble. Did they give you a dozen new servers also just for e-commerce?

• I have a merchant account at Wells Fargo. I didn't ask for it; BofA "gave" it to Wells Fargo when BofA got out of merchant processing. Now matching my account activity is like trying to reconcile you-know-who's checking account. One bank takes my money in real-time; the other bank tells me about it at cycle time. Best-of-breed is like serving me my locally-grown salad half way through my entrée-out of sync.

It's one thing to read the headlines. It's another when you experience the story first-hand. In a previous blog I defined the different meanings of integration. There are two types-Business Integration and Systems Integration. I'm not knocking anyone. I have the greatest empathy for the people responsible for Systems Integration resulting from the merger of banks. And we've got a ton of them right now, of the kind that cause nervous breakdowns-giant banks.

As I mentioned to a client recently, "Did the CFO set the go-live date, or was it the CIO's Gantt Chart that specified the realistic date?" I can't speak about the answers to that question in today's environment, but in my world, the CFO was king, and the CEO always liked his projections better than mine.

The good news is that somehow we always get things done. Y2K got done; other giant mergers got done either by Moet or by Prozak; our new government is outside the box enough to make sure "too big to fail" still works; there are now 13 ways (in 1970 there were five) a picky consumer can choose to bank without even a hiccup from most banks; and a $1.3 trillion deficit is just a number, unlike my line of credit that has a cap. So who's worrying?