When Northern Trust Corp. decided to launch its first online banking community back in the mid-'90s, the bank brought in an outside consultant to assess the situation. "The firm looked at our plan and said it would take two years to develop," says Tim Theriault, Northern Trust's chief technology officer and executive VP. Theriault thought that was too long and that his internal IT folks could do it faster. He was right: Northern Trust's IT team had the site up and running in nine months.

"We're very proud of that," Theriault says. But he acknowledges that the breakneck pace posed some risks, and the urgency behind bringing that product to market was a cultural revolution for the bank."Being naive at the time was helpful," he says.

Northern Trust has always placed a premium on ramping up time-to-market, but that emphasis has intensified as mergers lead to increasingly fierce competition in the midst of an uncertain economy. About a year ago, the bank began to focus on 90-day cycles for projects, giving each a tech and business sponsor who are jointly accountable for meeting deadlines. "Everything is about speed right now," Theriault says. "It's about how fast your audit and controls are in place, whether your disaster recovery is in place, how nimble you are."

The bank demonstrated its adaptability earlier this year by launching four online communities, including portals for institutional investors and private banking clients. It's using BEA Systems' WebLogic running on Sun Microsystems servers and accessing data through Hitachi storage area networks. The portals feature Reuters' market data and soon will also include information from other financial-service institutions, courtesy of Yodlee.com Inc.'s aggregation technology.

Tim Theriault, Northern Trust's chief technology officer and executive VP

Northern Trust's need for speed requires technology that can keep up. The BEA environment let the bank handle 100,000 hits a month last fall; the online communities were launched this year, and within four months that number increased to 1 million hits a day. "The scalability for the number of clients and number of apps we're putting through is just staggering," Theriault says.

To give its customer service a turbo boost, the company introduced an internal online inquiry tool. Anyone in the company can inquire about something elsewhere in company. The utility provides metrics on how well Northern Trust is performing in an effort to achieve significant productivity gains. The more the bank can do that, he says, the more cost it can take out of the process.

Here's how it works: An investment manager calls Northern Trust and says a trade was submitted, but that it wasn't settled in a timely manner and wants to know why. A customer-service rep pulls up the order and, with the online tool, can send an inquiry to the settlement department that says: "You didn't settle this in three days the standard turnaround; what was wrong?" The answer is communicated back and may be a simple: "Couldn't be processed it on time because the investment manager neglected to include some information."

The tool is more effective than E-mail, which doesn't measure efficiency, Theriault says. It logs requests, so managers can also look for patterns. "If we're getting the same questions a lot, that will drive process improvement, product improvement, tech improvement," he says.

Speedier responses also make happier customers. Before the online tool, the bank sometimes needed four or five days to get a question answered, and when an inquiry was submitted, there was no way on knowing whether it was received. Now there's an audit trail to show how quickly employees are responding, and managers are measured by how fast they're turning things around. That gives Northern Trust a powerful message of responsiveness and commitment to quality and client satisfaction, Theriault says. It's even given new meaning to the corporate acronym TNT (The Northern Trust), he says. "Now we say it stands for, 'Today, Not Tomorrow.'"

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