It's Lonely on the Edge

I painted some pretty dramatic pictures. People started calling my memo the "Jerry Maguire Mission Statement." Some of the guys came up to me and said, jokingly, "It's been nice knowing you." But I planned on sticking around, and these were things that we needed to know.

I tried to push the program forward. I coordinated a steering committee made up of representatives from every major department. It was a platform to make arguments for fairly modest investments in e-commerce.

But there were some frustrating times.

By the summer of 1999, it was clear that our cross-functional team wasn't the right approach, but we couldn't immediately establish a new e-commerce unit. Speed was sacrificed so that we could gain internal consensus. That's the kind of trade-off that you make at a traditional company. If you're not comfortable doing that, you ought to be working in a pure-play online business. To me, these trade-offs are worth making, because I believe that our business model is ultimately superior.

When we were a cross-functional team, each of the departments controlled its own e-commerce budget. So if we wanted, say, to run banner ads on Web sites that are frequented by financial advisers, the money for that came out of the marketing budget. Or if we wanted to build into our site the capability to provide our customers with online financial statements, we paid for that out of the transfer-agency budget. That system took us one rung up the ladder, but we needed to get to the top of the ladder. We needed a more integrated business unit with its own budget authority, and that's exactly what we've got now. Today, we go through the same budget process that everyone else does: Here is our strategy, and here are our objectives. These are the priority projects for this year, along with an estimate of what they'll cost. We're responsible for our own P&L, but right now we're a cost center -- with no "P" attached.

It's still very difficult to measure a lot of Web efforts using traditional ROI-type terms. I was very careful not to sell what we're trying to do as a way to cut costs in the short term. That's one mistake that a lot of traditional companies make. Instead, I've tried to sell our e-commerce program by pointing out two tangible economic effects. First, as we get people to accept their quarterly statements online and to have transaction confirmations emailed to them, there will be more cost reductions. But I also think that the Web will increase our revenues in another way: By giving shareholders and financial advisers more tools and in-depth information about our funds, and by developing closer relationships with them, we will be in a better position to retain our assets.

"Frightening won't work. You have to win on facts."

Amy Radin
amy.radin@citicorp.com
Former executive VP and chief marketing officer
The Dime Bancorp Inc.
New York, New York

As chief marketing officer for the Dime Savings Bank, Amy Radin was responsible for crafting an Internet retail-banking strategy to compete with rivals like Chase Manhattan and Citibank. With 128 branches in metropolitan New York, Long Island, and lower Westchester County, and with assets of $23 billion, the Dime has preserved its traditional customer base. In some areas, such as insurance sales, it has outperformed its larger rivals. But in the spring of 1999, when the Dime got serious about taking its business online, Radin knew that she would have only a fraction of the resources that the big banks had. Nevertheless, she helped launch the Dime Online Banking in February -- right before a hostile takeover attempt by North Fork Bancorp.

On June 27, Radin chose to leave the Dime and join an even bigger, more established player -- Citibank. Her new job: Bring Citibank's credit-card business to the Web. Here, she discusses her tenure at the Dime.

At the beginning, we felt very challenged. The Dime is well known and respected in the market, but as a midsized bank, we couldn't invest at the level that Chase, Citi, and Fleet can. So the proposition of having a separate online brand seemed much harder to us than it probably did to the bigger banks.

On the other hand, when we looked at what other people were doing, we saw the Web as an additional channel for giving customers a consistent experience. The CEO and the board understand that our need for an Internet-banking channel will not go away. They recognize that the cost of doing nothing is greater than the cost of investing.

Getting that kind of buy-in across the organization takes a lot of education. If you have a core group of people who are focused only on e-commerce, then you've got to keep everyone else informed about what you're doing on the e-commerce front. Frightening people won't work. You have to win on facts.