By Art Gillis

In a survey I conducted last year, 74 bankers were asked to complete a questionnaire. In addition to answering specific questions, I asked them to volunteer their own words describing how they felt about technology. Fifteen words kept popping up consistently among the group’s responses. Integration was one of them. But I’m not sure everyone had the same thing in mind when they referred to the word.

As with a lot of technology, one has to remove the marketing spin to get right down to the truth. When the word first appeared in the mid '80s, it was customary for vendors to pick up on the buzzword appeal, so every sales brochure described bank systems as integrated. They were not. But two decades later, it’s a safe bet that the top dozen or so core applications systems are in many ways integrated. Here is just one man’s opinion of the purest form of integration:

• Every application feeds the general ledger and the customer database automatically without human intervention.
• Every application follows a design concept that was created by one architect.
• What used to be called silos is now a universal Relational DataBase Management System.
• Tran codes follow a consistent pattern across all applications.
• Screen designs have a common look throughout.
• No duplication of data entry.
• Navigation is as clear as finding the bank’s vault.
• Prompts provide audit alerts as well as cross-selling opportunities without irritating the customer.
• Multitasking occurs smoothly without having to log off and on.
• All channels, real time or not, deliver data so that account status is the same.
• Foreign (other than the core vendor) ancillary applications lose their identity and become part of the core system, as opposed to “butted” to a portal of the core system.
• Being able to “Know the Customer” completely, not just for regulatory requirements but for the Business Development people in the bank.

Smarter technicians than me (I’m not a technician) can certainly add to my list of pure qualifications, but I’m comfortable in saying that any banker who has issues with integration today is living in a cave. Integration is available from several good vendors right now, just for the paying - paying for the system and paying for the pain of a conversion.

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