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How have your acquisitions impacted IT decision making?
Ward: With respect to acquisitions, we go in and identify any product gaps or differences. We need to identify whether those gaps or differences are important for us to make modifications to our system. But the general message is that we are not merging -- we are acquiring. And so we are going to convert the acquired organization to our platform and leverage the infrastructure that we have.
Bonetto: Sometimes when you acquire somebody, they've got a lot of this technology we don't have and the initial reaction of some of our [business] line people is, "We want that." We say, "Time out, guys. We are not going to get all that." Maybe we'll pick a piece of it that might be very advantageous and bring it in. But I think we take a pretty pragmatic point of view and that comes from the top--the top business side.
Ward: When we acquired United California Bank, we did an evaluation of their environment from a business point of view as well as a technology one. We came to the conclusion that they had a better commercial loan system, servicing system, international trade finance system and wire transfer system.
We sat in the room -- the line of business and technology -- and the line of business said, "Feature-to-feature this is a better looking system than what we are running. What I need to hear from you folks in technology is, is it a stable system? Is it a system that will run in our environment?
Is it adequately supported?" And we said, "Yes, yes, yes," to those answers.
It is absolutely never a situation where the technology group is saying to the line of business, "This is what you have to do." It's the line of business saying, "This is what we prefer to do. You let us know whether or not the technology is solid."
Is it difficult to keep business and IT aligned during an acquisition?
Ward: There's always a little bit of give-and-take. The [business] line needs to go out and identify what we really need, as opposed to what is nice to have, and then we go through a negotiation process. There's this common understanding that if we try to make too many changes, it's harder to keep the acquired organization focused during the transition. So I find that the line of business folks are very practical in terms of saying, "If I put a set of requirements on the technology people that elongates the process, then it's going to be that much longer operating as two banks instead of one."
Bonetto: I think we have been working on these [acquisitions] together for so long that we've got it down.
You mentioned your centralized IT department and monthly budget-allocation disciplines. As you continue to grow, can you maintain this structure?
Ward: I believe we'll keep the centralized model for quite some time. You need to keep evaluating your structure as you go, but between now and $100 billion in asset size, I would not expect to see much difference in our structure.
Bonetto: We've got a good working relationship here because that's kind of the way we run the bank. As we're growing, it's getting a little bit more challenging. The growth has created issues within technology as well; technology has to do more stuff. When we were running only in California, we had to deal with one time zone and one batch. It's not going to do us any good today because I've got branches in Wisconsin that are opening two hours before we do here. And so we've had to address [that] and make sure batches are running more efficiently. And, of course, we can't miss.
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