Woolwich wages £125m war on paper forms

High-street bank, Woolwich, has put £125m behind a scheme to reach customers through a variety of devices and to dramatically reduce the amount of paperwork in the process.

The former building society has spent between six and nine months working with IT services giant, ICL, to develop ecommerce and m-commerce offerings using technology from the service company's Lifestyle banking unit.

John Crane, general IT manager at Woolwich, said: "We're moving to a tailored service of banking and planning to consolidate 43 paper-based forms into one electronic form. This should mean less repetition for users of our services, and a single customer view for us."

The project, called Open Plan, allows the integration of high-street branches, ATMs, call centres, digital TVs and the Internet (accessed through either PCs or WAP-enabled mobiles). It brings together day-to-day financial products and services including banking, insurance, loans, and pensions.

Just days after the damning Don Cruickshank review of British banking Woolwich's Crane added that face-to-face advice, through bank branches, is "a core part of the proposition".

Woolwich is investing £125m in Open Plan, but declined to comment on ICL's share in that.

Other suppliers include AIT (for call centre technology), Eastman (for workflow software), Intel, Microsoft, Software AG, and Unisys. Woolwich uses IBM mainframes, but Crane said the company doesn't have anything comparable to ICL's Lifestyle.

Roy Bunyan, technical director, ICL Lifestyle banking, said: "Various companies will use our Lifestyle technology and we can expect some interesting use of avatars, biometric technology and so on. There is a real possibility with this to focus on the most valuable parts of the customer relationship."

Adam Hill, senior analyst at Datamonitor, said he is positive about the moves Woolwich is making.

"There is a trend of medium-sized players using technology to differentiate themselves, and we can certainly see this among the former mortgage banks like Abbey National, Halifax and Woolwich," he said.