Wells Fargo will be rolling out a new program this summer to help small business customers get their store fronts on the Web, about the same time two large corporate clients will roll out their larger, multi-lingual bank-enabled sites.

The California-based giant started up a special unit to focus on Internet commerce in January, although it has worked with business customers on the Web since 1995 and currently has more than 300 Internet merchant customers. It is now working on a system to integrate all the basic components a small business would need to get set up on the Internet, to act as the "broker" for the client.

"If you think about your small business segments, their primary need is a trusted, knowledgeable partner. ‘I need to get a URL. I need to get a Web-page designer, a payment processor.’ Most small businesses don’t know how to do that. They’ll have to contract with between seven and nine companies. We think we have an advantage. We can bring the strategic partners together so we can create a cohesive opportunity for the small business," said Michelle Banuagh, vice president with the e-commerce group. Although the bank now refers small business clients getting onto the Web to other companies for advice, the new program, called Wells Fargo iBox and expected to roll out in June, would be a packaged solution to the site development quandary.

For the large corporate business clients who are mostly already established on the Web, Wells has just unveiled the fruits of a partnership with Mitsubishi last month to develop merchant Web sites that can crack foreign markets. The new Web sites can deal in foreign currency and overcome the language barrier by displaying information in the local language. Wells takes the local currency by credit card, converts the payment into dollars for the U.S. company, and the bill appears in the local currency on the customer’s credit card bill. Formerly, if a customer bought a product over the Internet in yen, for example, the charge appeared on his or her bill in dollars, which led to some confusion.

The new feature, Banaugh said, goes a long way toward helping the merchant reduce customer service telephone calls and contributes to customer satisfaction. Wells and three more large U.S.-based companies are working on sites, which are looking for a late summer launch in preparation for the holiday season.