Webster Bank has long been a large and successful regional force in banking, having served Connecticut and the wider New England area, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island and more recently Westchester County, New York, just north of New York City, since it was founded in 1935.
Webster Financial Corporation (NYSE: WBS) is the holding company for Webster Bank, National Association and Webster Insurance. With $17.8bn in assets, Webster provides business and consumer banking, mortgage, insurance, financial planning, trust and investment services through 157 banking offices, 308 ATMs, telephone banking and the internet. In addition, HSA Bank, a division of Webster Bank, is the leading bank administrator and trustee of health savings accounts for this uniquely US product offering.
A new platform
In 2003, Webster had ambition, capital and aggressive plans for growth, but lacked the technology to match those plans. After a series of acquisitions in the late 1990s, Webster found itself running on a patchwork of disparate systems, many of them antiquated. Aside from making it difficult to combine information into meaningful management reports, it was a significant stumbling block to the bank’s plans for expansion. A new platform was needed that would meet its current and future needs.
Understanding the necessity of successfully positioning itself for the future, Webster Bank began looking for a partner to work with and achieve its vision of a fully integrated commercial bank. Many organisations, Webster included, have realised that to compete effectively in today’s marketplace, ageing legacy systems must be replaced. Coinciding with the arrival of EVP and CIO Zeynep Fredrick, Webster made a strategic decision. Rather than piecemeal, incremental change, it would commit to a total system overhaul, to shorten time to market for new products, including new commercial offerings, and to provide a single customer view for improved customer service.
“We were looking at a ‘big-bang’ conversion,” Mrs Fredrick explains, “swapping out our mainframe for something else entirely, replacing at least 20 core applications in the process. To accomplish this, we didn’t need a vendor, we needed a partner.”
In early 2004, after examining the core system applications used by different segments of the bank, it became apparent that Webster’s technology platform would need a significant boost to bring it up to speed. Webster identified key objectives to be met by its target environment, including flexible product offerings, scalable systems, an enterprise-wide view of the customer and consistent customer experience across all channels.
It was a huge project. The plan was to replace not only the retail and commercial core system platform but also the existing branch platform, back office and contact centres with new channel applications.
After careful consideration of available solutions, it became clear that the new partner could only be Fidelity National Information Services (FIS). A significant factor in the decision-making process was FIS’ commitment to a services-oriented integration architecture.
Webster believed that FIS’ Xpress Enterprise Services best met the bank’s integration requirements and delivered more business content than other middleware offerings. It felt confident that FIS could move all the bank’s operations to a new systems architecture that would allow for continued growth and optimal functional integration.
It determined that a lengthy, phased implementation approach would not meet its aggressive growth targets. Instead, it opted for a 12-month timeline. In the end, this was extended to 15 months to ensure staff were fully trained for the conversion and to ensure a positive customer experience. Key to the rapid implementation was Xpress. Xpress allowed the bank to rationalise integration between the bank’s channel applications and core processing systems. The component services and business process definitions in Xpress became part of the service and process library for Webster, and allowed the bank to deploy new processes as required by the business.
“One of our visions was for staff to have one screen to sign-on,” says Mrs Fredrick, “where they’d have access to everything they needed. No more jumping between different applications. FIS’ integration layer not only incorporated the systems running on the FIS mainframe, but even other third-party systems we had.”
Scalable result
On October 11, 2005, just over 15 months from the final vendor selection, Webster went ‘live’ with its transformation. The bank achieved a scalable processing environment for both its retail and commercial business, which would enable future growth. Adopting a SOA strategy enabled a transition from stacked silo applications to a flexible IT infrastructure. In addition, Xpress was also integrated to the bank’s own internally developed integration layer to support interfaces to non-FIS systems.
As part of the overall implementation activities, Webster and FIS made the necessary commitment to training the staff on the new systems, and went the extra step of training additional temporary workers to make sure customers’ needs would be met during the conversion.
The changeover went off without a hitch and was an overall success. In an incredibly short time, the bank was retrofitted with an updated SOA and integration to core processing and channel systems that would allow it to meet its ambitious corporate goals.
“We converted over a three-day weekend. I truly believe that hands-on training and having a committed, involved partner like FIS was one of the reasons for Webster to achieve this magnitude of a change and conversion successfully,” says Mrs Fredrick.
