AXA Financial's portal now handles about 25 percent of client life insurance and annuity transactions. It logged 250,000 transactions last year, and activity is growing about 25 percent a year. (The other transactions are through the company's voice-response system and call centers.) The portal, whose Verity search engine fields as many as 5,000 queries a month, resides at a Genuity data center under a managed services contract.

But even with the Web-based adviser workstations on tap and AXA Financial's push to offer most services online, the company still plans to stick with some legacy applications. For instance, AXA Financial won't move its insurance-related applications to the Web, Wollin says, because that would require the conversion of 3.5 million client insurance policies, costing the firm millions of dollars. The insurance applications run on IBM S/390 mainframes, as do AXA Financial's PeopleSoft financial applications.

But with the rate AXA Financial's portal is growing--it registers about 3,000 clients each month and soon will support the thousands of financial advisers--just how long the mainframe hardware can keep up with demand is unclear.

"We're starting to use a lot of mainframe cycles," Wollin says, "so we are dealing with how to maintain performance and absorb growth. We can't keep buying hardware forever."

AXA Financial's strategy is to surround the mainframe-based applications with self-service transaction systems, such as the company's online life and annuity tools. These tools let clients--a mixture of individuals and small and midsize businesses--transfer money among different funds without going through a customer-service representative.

Wollin says the company also has to juggle content with presentation, minimizing the elements on its pages to ensure that its customers and financial advisers--many of whom still use dial-up--don't have to take a coffee break every time a page loads. AXA Financial ended up keeping the content to a more manageable 50 KB to 80 KB (the designers had set it at 200,000 KB). "We had to lighten the ship to tune the performance by weeding out Flash and other dazzling, rotating stuff," Wollin says. The problem, he says, was that AXA Financial went with an outside Web creation company instead of tapping its internal developers. "I have creative people in-house who understand our business and how to integrate it with a Web site," he says.

AXA Financial's advisers, meanwhile, will get some new features when they join the portal, including online training and Siebel sales force automation tools. In addition, contact management tools will let the advisers access information on their clients, including inquiries and transactions they've made through a call center.

The portal also will allow the advisers to become more mobile. "They will be able to log in and do quite a bit of work from the hotel without carrying a laptop," using hotel PCs or kiosks, Wollin says.