Charter One Bank Taps Into Alert System

Charter One Bank has introduced FYI Alerts, a messaging service enabling online banking customers to receive account information on mobile phones, work or home phones, pagers, PDAs, e-mail, and fax.

The service is free to all Charter One personal and small business online banking customers. Customers can choose to be alerted to account activity such as recent transactions, low balances, new e-bill arrivals and more. FYI Alerts also allows users to request a full financial summary in the form of a mini-statement, which can be set up to arrive daily, weekly or monthly.

Centerpost Corp., Chicago, whose other clients include United Airlines, Travelocity and Motorola, is providing the service through its SmartDelivery technology.

Delivering account information conveniently to customers is vital, said Mark Grossi, executive vice president and chief retail officer at Cleveland-based Charter One Bank. "With Centerpost's technology, we've taken communications to the next level, which gives us an opportunity to build better relationships with our customers."

Once customers request information, Charter One delivers an alert using the communications channel preferred by each customer. Because the alerts are automated, personalized and interactive, Charter One can communicate more effectively and frequently with its customers. Centerpost's technology will be integrated with Charter One's existing online banking platform.

The FYI Alerts service also allows Charter One's business banking customers to take advantage of an alert forwarding service. When an alert is generated, the system will also notify their accountant, bookkeeper or other business contacts.

E-mail alerts can help resolve online customer needs quickly, wrote Moriah Campbell-Holt, a banking industry analyst with Gomez, an Internet quality measurement firm, in a recent research report. "Online bankers selected alerting above and beyond any other method when presented with a variety of methods in which they could learn of various events or problems regarding their accounts."

Centerpost's SmartDelivery service enables companies to engage in ongoing, proactive communications with customers or employees via voice, wireless, email, and fax. SmartDelivery fully integrates into a company's Web site, where customers choose the types of messages they want to receive and the devices where those messages are delivered. Companies use SmartDelivery to improve the quality of their communications while at the same time lowering costs.

Centerpost recently announced the seventh release of its Web services-based platform. Clients can take advantage of new capabilities that will ease the integration process, scale volume even more seamlessly, and offer consumers a user interface that's both cutting edge and highly intuitive.

An early Web services pioneer, Centerpost released its SOAP API into production over 18 months ago. The API enables companies to implement notification solutions quickly and cost-effectively. Centerpost's platform has delivered millions of multi-channel notifications on behalf of clients and has forecasted volume in the tens of millions by the end of the year.