While Wells Fargo no longer uses the Pony Express to communicate with customers, it still needs to guard messages, reports Greg Masters.

When Henry Wells and William Fargo founded a company to provide banking services to Californians in 1852, their quickest means of communicating with customers was via the Butterfield Overland Mail Company, the precursor to the fabled Pony Express. When the partners acquired the western operations of the delivery service eight years later, this was the first in a series of acquisitions that over the next 150 years would absorb a number of banks.

Wells Fargo & Co. is now a diversified financial services company with $1.3 trillion in assets. And it no longer relies on horses to carry messages to and from its 282,000 team members and 80-plus businesses. Headquartered in San Francisco, it operates 10,000-plus banking stores in 39 states and the District of Columbia.

Bipin Sahni (left), vice president, Wells Fargo Wholesale Banking group, says that because Wells Fargo must deliver confidential documents to its customers, and they need their financial information quickly for decision-making, his team was charged with finding a secure and easy-to-use method for its customers and team members to communicate by email.  

Sahni heads the wholesale architecture and commercial electronic office (CEO) mobile application development team and is responsible for providing and setting the direction for the application architecture for products rendered through the CEO portal. The technology and operations group supports the company's entire hosting needs, which include application hosting, mail servers, information security and enterprise information management for all its lines of business.

He and his team considered several email encryption products and chose Voltage SecureMail. “Our first consideration was the system's ability to protect confidentiality of private information about our customers,” says Sahni. “Our customers are at the center of everything we do. We make decisions from their perspective, and we protect the confidentiality of private information about them.”

Ease of adoption was also a key factor. “Voltage SecureMail gives us an automated way to deliver information to customers and team members quickly and securely, wherever they are,” he says.