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TechvisionMay 1 2014

People first, says Wells Fargo's 'technology futurist'

When it comes to designing customer portals for Wells Fargo’s internet and mobile offering, people come first, with technology a distant second, says the bank’s Wholesale Services Group head, Steve Ellis. 
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People first, says Wells Fargo's 'technology futurist'

He is dubbed the bank’s ‘technology futurist’, but the brain behind many of Wells Fargo’s innovations does not have technology as the foremost thing on his mind.

Steve Ellis is the head of Wells Fargo’s Wholesale Services Group, which includes the bank’s enterprise payments strategy, technology services and treasury management groups, as well as other areas such as customer analytics, and mobile and social media strategies.

Surprisingly with this wide remit, the bank’s tech visionary does not think about the technology first. “It is really about people and processes,” he says. “And technology layers into that to enable better services rather than building everything around the technology. We are a people business. People knowing people, that is what makes things happen.”

A bank of firsts

Now in his third decade of working for Wells Fargo, Mr Ellis has led the bank to a number of firsts. It was the first bank in the US to provide an internet portal for commercial banking customers when it launched the Commercial Electronic Office (CEO) in 2000, and the bank says it was also the first US bank to offer mobile services for corporate and commercial customers.

Wells Fargo recognised early on the power of social media, a trend that Mr Ellis expects to continue as a major trend for the industry. The bank has been a pioneer in the field, seeing social media as a customer service channel. “It is about social relationships rather than social selling. It is an important distinction,” he says.

The ‘founding father’ of Wells Fargo’s CEO portal explains that the bank is improving the website’s functionality so there is no distinction between whether a customer is accessing the site on a desktop, tablet or mobile device.

One service, many devices

Online banking was previously thought of as PC banking, says Mr Ellis, and mobile banking was almost thought of as something separate. “Now they are one and the same thing. People work on phones, PCs and tablets, and do not care what device they are using,” he says.

The bank is now working on delivering the same experience, regardless of device. For example, if someone sleeps near their smartphone, they might start checking emails before they get out of bed, switch to their tablet to start a banking transaction, then move to another room and finish on a laptop. The aim is for that banking process to be seamless between devices so that the new device picks up where the last one left off.

When asked if he realised when mobile banking was first introduced that customer behaviour would look like this, Mr Ellis says that back in 2006 “we thought: we do not know where the hardware is going and so we hang our hat on our customers and screen size”. Rather than designing a service for the various devices and operating systems, he says: “We are building for people, screen size and their situation.”

Currently, there are three screen sizes – mobile, tablet and PC – but it could be possible to build a fourth for wearables, such as Google Glass. This, he explains, would be relatively simple as it would not be a case of starting again, but going into the code base and building the fourth screen size into it.

Biometric future

Alongside the ubiquity of mobile devices, Mr Ellis expects that biometrics – the use of technology to detect and recognise human characteristics and behaviour ­– will begin to take off in the next three years. Banks will increasingly seek to know more about their customers, how they use the technology and their location. With a phone fingerprint or a voice print, this will be a more powerful security experience, he says.

Biometrics is something that has been dabbled with at the fringes of the industry, but has yet to become widespread. Mr Ellis says that in the past there was a view that the technology was not robust enough to provide a consistent and reliable customer experience. Now, he says, the biometric technology is of a good standard. With the explosion in the use of smartphones, an identifying characteristic, such as voice authentication, can be coupled with identifying the device itself, which makes for a more powerful proposition than in the past.

Also, Mr Ellis notes, customers are now familiar and comfortable with their smartphones, and are happy to speak into them, a far cry from the original phone bank services, when customers did not even have tone dial landline phones.

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Read more about:  Digital journeys , Tech vision