March, 2001
By Claire Chapman
Harland's New Friends
John H. Harland Co. is in the client hunt for mid-sized financial firms, and is putting together a posse of tech firms to arm itself with the best software muscle possible. Its most recent deal, with Maxxar, combines Harland's Channel Expert with Maxxar's interactive voice response system. This pairing will allow institutions to combine the ChannelExpert's marketing savvy with Maxxar's delivery and dispatch targeted messages to customers.
When customers identify themselves to their bank's response system, ChannelExpert determines the best message in response, based on the customer's profile. For example, if a customer is a likely candidate for a home equity loan, the script would be customized with a spoken message from a loan officer while the customer is still completing the transaction.
The Maxxar union follows an earlier deal struck with North Communications in November. In that deal, Harland's ChannelExpert combined with North's Aurora on-line banking software for kiosks, improving cross-selling capabilities.
The end game for these various partnerships-seven to 10 more are expected within the next six months-is to turn ChannelExpert into multi-channel belle of the ball for mid-tier financial institutions. Using ChannelExpert and its partners would theoretically allow a bank to record every customer's action related to his financial institution. If a customer withdraws funds in the morning at an ATM and decline a sales pitch for a loan product, a call center rep will have the information on hand if the customer calls later on. "Every action can be recorded immediately within a core processing system," says Scott Hansen, Harland's vice president of financial solutions. This means institutions will be able to figure out profitability per product or customer much faster.
ChannelExpert establishes a tracking system for marketing offers and enables institutions to avoid repeating messages to the same customer. The program can quantify how many times the offer was made and how many times contact produced a sale. There are some risks involved, namely backlash from consumers angered by having their activities tracked in such detail. But Hansen says he is not worried because all of the systems in question will be under the Harland umbrella, and no third party will have access to the data.
Hansen says Harland primary targets will be firms with between $250 million and $35 billion in assets, including a number of credit unions. Harland's next round of partnerships will aim to saturate every delivery channel imaginable for financial services, including the Internet, ATMs, Voice Response Units, and kiosks. The future is wide open, Hansen says.
