Regions Financial's Quest for a Business-Aligned IT Organization

John Dick, executive vice-president and CIO, at Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions Financial Corp. was hired in 2001, to bring new clarity to the IT operation of an institution that had galloped into super-regional size over a decade of MA conversions were a dominant aspect of the department's workload. Otherwise, the IT staff was oriented to maintaining core-processing systems--these guys were mainframe gurus. But the bank had limited experience with distributed computing. When I met with senior management in 2001, I was told the bank needed IT to move beyond its MA Appro and LaserPro in the loan origination process. We've done a lot of transaction automation using Sellstation and have fully integrated the loan process. The infrastructure upgrade must have been costly. Quite frankly, we did all this work at a good time in the business cycle. The technology industry had suffered a setback during that period. However, while other banks backed away from technology purchases, we opted to move forward, despite the economic outlook at the time. As a result, we were able to refresh routers and upgrade our storage and servers used throughout the branch network and get standardized on Server 2003 and Microsoft XP without breaking the bank. …