Bank of the West, a full-service commercial bank serving the personal and business needs of customers in 19 states and with more than 700 retail and commercial locations, has taken the hosted route and passed its voice automation needs on to Intervoice (News - Alert) with a contract valued at approximately $1.1M over 36 months.

 

With Intervoice Dedicated Hosted Services, the banks entire voice automation system moves to a hosted environment—no longer requiring the Bank to maintain the voice automation infrastructure, but still allowing them to develop applications that run on the new Intervoice hosted platform, as they need them.

 

By moving to a hosted environment, the bank is able to better focus on serving customers and deliver services they will value, instead of maintaining infrastructure.

 

Bank of the West not only made the decision to move to a hosted environment because it freed them from having to maintain their own infrastructure, but also because Intervoice presented a compelling case for ROI, as well as flexibility within their offering, and specific expertise in the financial services vertical.

 

With Intervoice's hosted services, customers can select the option that's best suited to their specific deployment requirements, while also feeling secure that the privacy and security of sensitive customer information is maintained.

 

"Intervoice clearly has more experience in working with and complying with the strict banking security requirements than any other voice automation vendor in the industry," said James Hanna, EVP and Chief Technology Officer, Bank of the West.

 

As per the agreement, Bank of the West has said they will transfer all the authority of their monitoring and hosting voice automation technology to Intervoice at two locations: Fargo, North Dakota and Omaha, Nebraska. Also, as the company grows, it has said Intervoice will expand the number of managed ports.

 

"Bank of the West fits the profile of the financial services institutions we are now seeing who are choosing to move to a hosted environment," Mark Harris, senior vice president, global services and America's operations, Intervoice commented.

 

"These are companies that require not only the flexibility to deploy their own applications in an environment that will grow with them but also demand a compelling ROI. And they need to know that the hosted partner they've chosen has experience in their vertical industry that they can trust."