At JPMorgan Chase, the retail bank aims to make it easy for customers to get at the information they need regardless of where it is located within the bank.

“You should, as a client, be able to be independent of channel to get an answer or to go across products,” said Greg Murray, vice president of treasury and securities services at the bank. “You should be able to ask about several products without being pointed in different directions,” he added, during Financial Insights’ customer conference in Boston in September.

The challenge is an old one, but solutions are now coming into implementation at banks around the world. Although clients think of themselves as customers of the bank, from the bank’s view they have looked like checking accounts, mortgages, credit cards, certificates of deposit, or home equity loans. Each account had a different number, and banks, organized along product lines, traditionally have not been able to consolidate the information. Often the individual product managers didn’t see much point in doing so, since their compensation was based on a single product line, not overall customer profitability. No wonder the industry has come to speak of the situation in terms of silos. Mergers and acquisitions, which often brought along incompatible legacy systems, have only made the problems more difficult.

A couple of things are leading banks to change their thinking.

One is a search for higher profits. Banks want to sell more products to existing customers, since it costs a lot more to acquire a new customer than to sell to one who already receives bank mailings, visits a branch regularly, or comes to the bank’s Web site. Wells Fargo is an industry leader in share of wallet with four accounts per customer.

Second is the Internet. As banking analysts have pointed out for years, new channels don’t replace old channels; they just add to the infrastructure banks have to support. While consumers are happy to use the Internet to check account balances, research investments, or pay bills, when it comes to a big decision such as signing up for a mortgage they often want personal advice. To get it, they will happily jump from call center to branch visits to Internet applications, and they expect the bank to respond intelligently and consistently wherever they happen to turn up. They don’t want to hear about segregated delivery channels, or be told their half-filled application belongs to the Internet group, and folks at the branch don’t have access to it. That has compelled banks to make information available across channels to support bank employees in their dealing with customers, and to provide information directly to clients.

Finally, consumers who are accustomed to tracking FedEx packages, getting recommendations from Amazon, and comparing options, studying maps, and booking travel through Expedia are not going to put up with a bank that doesn’t know who they are and can’t tell during a meeting in the branch that they have filled out a mortgage application over the Internet. Well, customers may put up with it for awhile, but when leading banks provide a choice, they are apt to vote with their accounts.

Michon Schenck, COO at Financial Insights, thinks her bank shouldn’t need to ask her address when she refinances her mortgage.

Michon Schenck, COO of Financial Insights, asked why, when she refinances her mortgage through the bank where she has had her accounts for years, she has to fill out a new application and give them her social security number and address once again. If one of their more demanding customers is still tolerating this, banks may have another year or two to synchronize their delivery channels, but they probably shouldn’t rely on inertia as a strategy.

Leaders like JPMorgan Chase aren’t waiting. One reason to move quickly is that internal integration combined with self-service can significantly reduce operating costs.

“If your clients are calling for very routine information,” explained Murray, “you can provide it through an expensive human channel or give them a Web channel to get it themselves. That deflects the call, enables the client to get his answer quickly, and lets the service staff focus on more complex issues.”

JPMorgan Chase provides access through a portal so clients can get to all their account information through a single sign-on. The next challenge, said Murray, is breaking down internal walls between types of information.

“If you are looking at your cash online, you should be able to drill down instead of navigating to another spot,” he said.

Despite building 50 new branches a year throughout New Jersey, and now in New York as well, and keeping them open for long hours seven days a week, fast-growing Commerce Bank boasts one of the highest rates of customer online use in the country, according to Thomas Gregory, its vice president for cash management.

“We are validating the concept that these additional delivery channels should be looked at as complementary channels and not alternate channels,” said Gregory. “At the end of day, the customer wants more options. We do our best not to channel customer behavior. We provide as many access points as possible.”

Commerce Bank’s structure facilitates cross-channel operations that flow easily from its extensive branch network to its heavily used Internet channel. The bank doesn’t have many organizational silos, said Gregory.

“Every deposit accrues to a branch, not to the corporate bank,” he said. “Our corporate customers have a very high level of dependency on the local bank branches. At the end of the day, the customer wants more options. So we are open seven days a week, late at night even until midnight at some branches,” Gregory added. Commerce Bank’s core system is Kirchman, running on an IBM mainframe. Out in front, though, are Windows-based applications like Corillian, facing the customers and drawing on information stored on SQL Server databases.

“All our channels are SQL Server-based except Edify, but we are flipping that to SQL soon,” said Jack R. Allison IV, vice president in charge of retail strategy at the bank. “The key for us is the integration between the two (mainframe and customer applications). The functionality comes from the Windows Server, and then the big iron in the back just processes the hell out of it.” The bank is in a joint project with Kirchman to move its teller platform from a Visual Basic fat client to a browser, he added.

Harland Financial also provides an integration platform – EZ Teller – that takes information from back-office systems and service bureaus and makes it easy for tellers to use.

“It can prompt the teller to warn a customer she is running out of checks, or to observe that her loan is nearly paid and does she want to do something else with that $300 a month,” said John Meyer, director of operations for EZ Teller at Harland. The teller workstation runs off a SQL Server database, so if communication links to the main office fail, the branch can remain open.

“Anything that faces the customer should be important to the financial institution if service is its primary differentiator,” he added. For example, the most frequent service inquiry at the teller window is over a lost ATM card. At most banks, the teller jots down an 800 number on a bit of paper and hands it to the client. EZ Teller provides a way for the teller to enter the customer information quickly.

“Usually, if he has a cell phone, the bank service department is calling by the time the client gets into his car.”

With branches piling on top of one another, banks are competing on quality of service, which requires teaching their channels to play together nicely.

Whether channel neutral or encouraging customers to move to less costly Internet access, banks are learning some lessons as they improve customer service.

At JPMorgan, Murray has no tolerance for sites which don’t offer a way to reach support personnel directly. Users should be able to find a phone number or at least an email address. That said, he would like to see heavier use of Web self-service. To encourage it, the bank makes sure that the Web is the fastest way to get an answer.

“E-care should have the highest service levels,” he said. “If customers can get a faster answer by calling, they will continue to call.”

At ABN AMRO, email gets a very fast response, said Milton Santiago, senior vice president and head of electronic banking products at the bank. It has eight staff focused on email and phone.

“They support customers with aggressive service level agreements,” he said. “Their email response time is 1 minute and 15 seconds, and that is with a solution. And they are not afraid to pick up a phone and call the customer if that is what’s needed to satisfy them.”

That’s quite a difference from what Unisys found in a global study of banks last year. Its survey of bank Web sites showed that while seven of the top ten banks provided contact information on their Web sites, only four responded to an inquiry.

ABN also uses email proactively. After the terrorist attack of 9-11, and again after the recent hurricanes in the U.S., it sent out 40,000 emails to customers warning that some deposits and payments could be delayed.

“We offer email, charts, and self-service on the Internet, and the adoption has been strong. Now we are focusing on alerts, because customers wanted them. The solutions are all managed from a single knowledge base, so we can offer consistent responses,” he said. The bank’s primary channel for alerts is email, followed by voice.

Banks around the world are struggling with issues of branches, self-service, costs, and the need to remain in touch with customers personally, said Jonathan Charley, managing partner in the global banking group at Unisys. Banks did pretty well pushing transactions out of the branch, with ATMs and Internet banking, and then they began to worry about the drop-off in foot traffic.

“They want to encourage self-service, but they still want footfall. Banks are now seeing the branch as absolutely fundamental to growing the top line,” Charley said.

Experiments abound, from Washington Mutual’s high-touch branches, which he described as interesting to Abbey in the UK where the coffee shops in some branches have proved better at selling coffee than selling new banking products. Commonwealth Bank in Australia has used a similar concept, the coffee shop in the branch, but aims it at small business and medium enterprise customers. Branches offer small business owners the use of conference rooms that can be reserved, even by companies that aren’t customers, so they can hold meeting with clients. In Belgium some banks are doing well with unmanned branches, while Lloyds in the UK has segmented the country into 190 local markets in which customers may be treated quite differently. In areas with older customers, the bank hires older tellers and encourages them to chat with clients.

“They have concluded that the older generation wants consistency in the people they deal with,” said Charley.

ING, the Dutch bank, has disrupted markets around the world with a direct banking model that offers minimal services and advantageous rates.

“They are building on operational excellence, but I don’t think many banks will try to take that path – it requires simple products and scale to be successful,” he said.

He expects banks to start taking the information on customers’ checks and using it to generate targeted offers. With Check 21, banks will increasingly capture the information in images, so they can tell where a customer has his mortgage, or pays his car insurance. Then the bank can send out an offer for mortgage financing or insurance, probably without indicating that it is acting on information from the customer’s check.

Many banks are hiring senior executives from retailing, and they bring along such common practices as store-by-store comparison of sales on a daily basis, or sales this year compared to last year, Charley added.