Regions Moves Online Banking In-House

Regions Financial Corp. is one of the first financial institutions to benefit from a new partnership between S1 and IBM to offer a total e-finance solution.

Regions is moving all of its online customer data-currently routed through and stored at an S1 data center-onto in-house IBM servers. IBM is working with Regions to install the new hardware and to provide training to Regions' employees.

The move will give the Birmingham, Ala.-based bank more control over the online banking experience of its customers, and it will also allow Regions more flexibility as it upgrades its online consumer banking services. This flexibility is particularly important as both the bank's customer base and the expectations of its customers increase.

"As our customer base increases, there was a need for us to get a solution that would scale," said Michael F. Jackson, president of e-commerce at $45.7 billion Regions. "We saw this as a natural fit for us-we thought it would work well."

Regions most recently upgraded its S1 system in September to improve the online banking experience of its customers. The upgrade meant that customers had several more hours each day to complete transactions, as well as access to real-time balances.

Now, by bringing its online traffic in-house onto upgraded IBM servers, Regions hopes to even further improve the online banking experience of its customers, though many of the improvements offered by the new S1/IBM system will be initially invisible to them.

"It'll be a seamless transition for our customers," said Jackson. "But this will give us a little more control over our customer's experience."

Another major benefit of controlling its online transactions in-house is that the bank will be able to more easily upgrade the functionality of its system in the future, thus giving it more flexibility to meet the needs of its customers.

"This system will be the centerpiece of our Internet banking system," said Jackson. "We will continue to build and add functionality on this system."

S1 Consumer Banking enables Regions to provide customers with multichannel access to checking, savings, CD, money market, credit card and loan accounts. An intuitive interface brings all of these accounts into one consolidated view, providing convenient and easy access for customers to perform a variety of tasks including viewing balances and statements, verifying cleared transactions, transferring funds and paying bills electronically.

S1 Consumer Banking also provides enhancements that enable banks to extend services to consumers using a full range of wireless devices, including Web-enabled phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and pagers.

Consumer Banking is one of several applications from S1 that can be deployed on IBM infrastructure, which includes the eServer pSeries and zSeries, WebSphere e-business infrastructure software and DB2 Universal Database.

Other S1 products supporting IBM hardware include eFinance solutions for small business, corporate banking, investments and relationship management.