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Seattle, the caffeine capital, doesn't sprint to mind as a center of banking and finance. But the headquarters location of Washington Mutual, the No. 5 company on this year's InformationWeek 500, isn't the only thing that sets it apart from its competitors.
WaMu, as it's commonly known, is cut from different cloth than other banks. In the past year, it's won a slew of awards for customer service, innovation, and being a great place to work. Much of that success can be attributed to its leadership role in applying IT to making banking easier for thousands of customers. "Every executive, every leader recognizes that in order to be successful, our technology has to be very, very strong," says Debora Horvath, executive VP and CIO. Free online checking, rolled out as a service last year, is one of the company's most recent innovations. A couple of years ago, Richard Blunck, the company's director of e-commerce, received a late-night phone call from then-chief marketing officer Brad Davis, pushing the radical idea of no-cost checking with added services after a meeting with other executives earlier in the day. "In many cultures, people would say, 'Oh, I don't like the sound of that,'" Blunck says. But CEO Kerry Killinger "pushes innovation and really believes in it to our core," says Blunck. "Here, it's like 'Cool, it's playtime.'" By May 2006, WaMu had set up a free online account-creation system called Instant Checking that for the first time didn't require customers to come in to one of its 2,225 branch offices to set up an account.
So, simpler it is. Here's the process to establish an online checking account with WaMu: Enter name, address, and other personal information; verify identity by answering questions that are known only to the account holder; provide a user name and password; direct WaMu how to fund the new account, for example, via wire transfer, direct deposit, or credit card. Voilà, that's it. The system automatically sends checks and a debit card to new members, and a savings account can be added with one click of a check box rather than filling out a separate application. Once a customer writes his or her first check, that check acts as the signature card to securely validate the account. By May, online metrics company ComScore found that 35% of all new online banking customers were going to WaMu, more than doubling the rate of any other free checking account. Before Instant Checking, WaMu opened 2,150 online accounts a month. Today, it's opening more than 2,700 accounts daily, a growth of 3,720% in 15 months. And Instant Checking saves WaMu about $20 million a year on the cost of opening accounts, much of that in reduced handling time and paperwork. |
