Whitney National Bank Taps IBM for Customer Service

March 9, 2010

Whitney National Bank, an independent business bank in U.S. Gulf South, is deploying IBM technologies to integrate and speed the delivery of specialized services to its growing customer base. The benefits include providing new levels of efficiency and intelligence to both the bank and its customers.

To compete in today's dramatically altered financial playing field, banks must employ smarter banking strategies to achieve new levels of risk control, efficiency and customer service. Whitney will be able to extract key intelligence to obtain a full view of a customer's transaction history -- including a comprehensive analysis of sales trends and costs -- to deliver more customized services and offerings. Increased visibility to this account data also empowers the bank's customers to regulate their activities and expenses.

IBM's new solutions are also helping drive new operational efficiencies. After acquiring more than a dozen banks, Whitney faced the challenge of consolidating customer information and reducing IT applications such as those supporting checking and savings account management, online bill payment and loan processing. In the past, if a customer requested a report of daily transactions, the information had to be pulled from a dozen different systems that could take a few days to deliver. That has now been reduced to hours and minutes.

By deploying the IBM Banking Industry Framework, a portfolio of pre-built financial reports and dashboards, Whitney will cut its banking applications in half and be able to retrieve customer information instantaneously. The bank will also improve service levels by automating routine processes while reducing costs and eliminating redundancies across the enterprise.

"Rather than a collection of disparate solutions, IBM has provided a comprehensive solution spanning process design and service frameworks to reporting that are helping us achieve our growth objectives while arming us with the insight to become a more responsive and agile bank," said Thomas "Stan" Limerick, Whitney's Senior Vice President and Director of Strategy and Architecture, Operations & Technology Division. "As we expand, we are confident that the infrastructure we have in place will support both the high expectations our customers have for us and we have for ourselves."

The bank is also migrating to IBM Power System with DB2 in its data centers in Allen, Texas and Prattville, Alabama. These new systems provide Whitney with greater flexibility, lower risk and improved customer service. The new Power System enables Whitney to cut disaster recovery times between its data centers from hours to seconds.