FleetBoston Launches Collaborative Portal for Wholesale Banking

FleetBoston has licensed software to enable a content-centric collaborative portal for relationship managers and product specialists in its wholesale banking group.

Called Fleet Business Advisor, the portal allows users to access and exchange documents, images and reports in real time, drawing this "unstructured" content from disparate Fleet repositories throughout the enterprise. It streamlines relationship management, portfolio analysis, deal execution and the sales process, thereby saving significant costs for Fleet.

Using VeniceBridge content management software from Venetica, Charlotte, N.C., the new collaborative portal will allow Fleet to strengthen relationships with partners and customers by providing a real-time environment to complete deals and transactions, saving time and money while simplifying a wide variety of very complicated processes, according to Dean Athanasia, group executive at $200 billion FleetBoston. "With this application, we are able to significantly reduce the time to close the deal and significantly increase customer satisfaction."

Fleet offers multiproduct financial solutions to its customers that require many participants across multiple divisions seamlessly working together on numerous applications. Fleet Business Advisor integrates these applications into a single portal and provides a collaborative workspace to facilitate strong communication and tight coordination among the deal team members. As part of the delivery of complex financial products, documents are gathered, created and analyzed by many different internal and external parties. Business Advisor provides a secure, managed environment for these documents to be shared and processed, improving the cycle time by as much as 25 percent.

VeniceBridge is infrastructure software that provides the ability to access, aggregate, deliver and exchange content stored in multiple, disparate content repositories through one interface. As organizations deploy applications such as portals, collaborative applications and customer relationship management, they require access to more than just data. These applications require access to supporting content, such as customer profile documents, invoice images and credit reports that are stored in repositories throughout the enterprise. Seamless integration to content has become critical to the ongoing success of these application initiatives.

VeniceBridge provides the infrastructure that portals, collaborative applications, customer relationship management and other key applications use to access and exchange content throughout the enterprise and among trading partners. At the heart of VeniceBridge is a single, consistent interface that enables applications to quickly integrate with the multiple, disparate repositories that store documents, images, reports, rich media and other relevant content. VeniceBridge can then aggregate, deliver and exchange the content with other applications in real-time. Its Java-based architecture includes a SOAP-based web services interface.

"Fleet is well known for its progressive application of technology and for using the Internet to improve management and business practices within the organization," said Stuart Levinson, president and CEO of Venetica. "As one of the largest financial holding companies in the nation, Fleet recognizes the importance of content to improve collaboration and to manage an extremely complex business process."