Innovative CIOs 2007: McCartin Strives for Flexibility and Agility at National City

Though National City CIO Joseph McCartin's responsibilities haven't changed considerably over the past year, the focus within his IT group has shifted significantly. "We've spent the last few years renewing our core systems to make them more flexible and agile," McCartin says. "Now our focus is to leverage these new customer-centric capabilities in ways that will differentiate us from other banks."

For example, Cleveland-based National City has leveraged its new relationship pricing and billing platform to make available a set of bundled product offerings to its small-business clients. Small-business owners now can combine their checking, savings, sweep and cash management products in a service bundle that saves them money, McCartin points out.

McCartin plans to continue that customer focus in the coming year by improving the bank's use of customer data to further develop insights into what customers value. "Once we understand the customer value proposition," he says, "we will leverage our relationship pricing and billing platform, along with our cross-channel customer interaction management architecture, to automate how we will differentiate our customers' experience with National City at every customer interaction point."