Power Partners

Now she is leading Wells Fargo's efforts in one of Internet banking's most beguiling -- and most bewildering -- areas: letting consumers bank via wireless Internet connections to cell-phones, handheld computers, and other small devices. No one has any firm idea how big of a market this might eventually become. It's possible that it might never take off in the United States. Yet there are enough glimmers of encouragement that Wells Fargo and many other big banks believe that they would be negligent if they didn't make some serious attempts to master this exotic new form of personal finance.

For now, even the best prototypes of wireless banking are slow, cumbersome, and severely limited. Something as rudimentary as holding a cell-phone and typing in "www.wfwireless.com" requires 42 keystrokes -- an ordeal that hardly encourages frequent use.

Sheer geometry makes it impossible, for now, to come up with a more elegant approach. Even the biggest cell-phone display screens are just 11 lines deep and less than 2 inches wide. More typically, cell-phone displays are just 6 lines deep. That amounts to less than 1% of the effective display space on a PC monitor, and it forces users to scroll down constantly for even the simplest tasks.

Nonetheless, when Wells Fargo asked online-banking customers who own a cell-phone or a PDA if they would like to be part of a pilot study of wireless banking, some 80% of respondents said yes. "We need to be sure that we're doing a good job with these early adopters of new technologies," Reed says. "We don't ever want them to feel that they have to go elsewhere to try out the latest and greatest."

Making things even more challenging, the underlying technology of wireless commerce is in tremendous flux, and no one is quite sure which format will win. All kinds of global companies -- such as Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and more -- use different hardware and software for each model of cell-phone. Wireless-application protocols are still being thrashed out, with rival groups championing rival ideas. While data-transmission speeds are slow now, they're expected to get faster -- but the timeline isn't clear. And even the wavelengths used for transmissions could evolve.

"We don't want to be trying to pick winners from day one," says Cathy Graeber, 47, Reed's boss and executive vice president in charge of overall consumer Internet initiatives at Wells Fargo. "We'd much rather partner with someone who can negotiate with everyone and come up with solutions that work on multiple platforms."

That partner is 724 Solutions Inc., a 3-year-old Toronto-based company that specializes in wireless banking. It made its mark early on by helping Bank of Montreal develop its version of cell-phone banking, and it is now doing the same for Wells Fargo and several other giant U.S. banks. According to Greg Wolfond, 39, chairman and CEO of 724 Solutions, his company is clearing the way for Wells Fargo to offer wireless Internet banking via 11 types of cell-phones, as well as via the Palm VII handheld digital assistant.

Carrying out such a project involves an enormous amount of coordination among software engineers, regulators, marketing departments, and others. That's part of Reed's job, and she brings classic big-company project-management skills to the table. Every Tuesday at 1 PM, she holds a conference call with the 724 Solutions team, making sure that deadlines are being met and figuring out how to keep small delays from becoming big ones.

On a recent Tuesday, Reed flips through a project-overview chart with 447 distinct tasks. "Is call coding going to be completed this week?" she asks. "Yes," a voice assures her. When there's an unexpected delay, Reed doesn't rip into the dawdler; she just presses him or her for a new schedule and makes sure that follow-up tasks aren't left in limbo. It's unglamorous work, but it's the difference between carrying out a big project within a few weeks of the original schedule -- and watching deadlines slip catastrophically far away.

After the schedule review, Tim Farr, a top technical consultant to Wells Fargo, brings in a Sprint PCS cell-phone and a Palm VII device -- two of the first devices to be fully capable of secured Internet banking. As he goes through the demonstration, Reed and her colleagues do their best to sound upbeat about the cell-phone. But its tiny screen has a hard time keeping pace with their requests. By contrast, the Palm VII's screen -- slightly bigger than a business card -- looks wonderfully spacious and complete.

Before long, even Reed is indulging in the favorite pastime of a technology enthusiast: imagining what the next machine could do. "The display is monochrome for now," she says. "But soon there will be a color version. We should check with 724 Solutions and make sure they can get the Wells Fargo logo in red and yellow."