Sanwa Bank pushing financial services to the Web

Slow to join the race to provide Web banking services, Sanwa Bank of Japan plans a sprint forward this spring with new online brokerage and lending services for its commercial and retail customers in the U.S.

The third-largest agricultural lender in the U.S., with a focus on California, Sanwa operates 107 brick-and-mortar branches in that state. Sanwa has $9.3 billion in assets, with commercial banking offices in New York and Chicago. But despite its size, it has only watched from the sidelines as other financial firms set up increasingly complex operations on the Web.

But that has to change for the bank to compete in an age where e-commerce is becoming the norm, says David Espenschied, first senior vice president for Sanwa's Web Banking Business Unit. Espenschied joined the firm last month from Countrywide Home Loans, where he was CEO of its Electronic Business Division.

"We are behind our competition, but we intend to be a fast follower," Espenschied says, noting Sanwa's Web site today remains primarily informational rather than transactional.

Espenschied and Mona Chui, vice president and manager of the emerging technology section at Sanwa, are organizing the push to present a broad array of the bank's financial services on the Web in a matter of months to meet customer demand for online services, including investment banking, lending and account management.

Several Sanwa Bank departments administer these financial services today, and one of the main challenges, Chui says, is finding a way to let business managers control how their individual departments will post content to the Sanwa e-commerce site.

Sanwa elected to use a distributed Web content management tool from Eprise. While Espenschied declines to name competing document management tools that were evaluated, he says the Eprise Participant Server did well during tests in its ability to process data transmitted from multiple back-end databases and application servers.

"We need to be able to post content in several ways," Chui says. "We need to allow 15 to 20 departments to use it, and Eprise allows us this distributed content management both dynamically and manually."

On the corporate LAN behind the Web server, Eprise can be automatically set up to periodically publish content from Microsoft or Oracle back-end databases to the Web server. With Eprise Participant Server, changes to HTML pages can't be posted on the Web server for public viewing until supervisors approve them, which is done through an e-mail notification that contains a hyperlink to the HTML changes.

Through e-mail-based workflow, Eprise lets any number of supervisors view the proposed changes.

Right now, Espenschied and Chui are ensuring that Sanwa employees responsible for managing Web content creation are trained in using Eprise, which costs about $200,000. Systems integrator Corillian has been enlisted to assist in the business-to-business application development.

When it's ready to go later this spring, Espenschied says, Sanwa Bank will be in the running to provide interactive brokerage services, investment banking and retail online banking.