Merrill Lynch's IT Initiatives

Known for its conservative approach towards client servicing and having its focus on offering personalized services, ML had always been in the forefront in the adoption of IT for serving clients better. By the mid-1980s, ML's financial advisors (FA) were serving their clients using IBM desktops on which market information was supplied by market data vendors.

The beginning of the Internet era in the 1990s and the growing demand for improved customer services pushed ML to reorganize its IT systems. The company launched the much talked about Trusted Global Advisor (TGA) platform in the late 1990s which significantly changed the way client services were delivered in the financial services industry.

However, industry analysts were sceptical about the success of the WMW project. Commenting, on this, Punishill of Forrester Research said, “This is the biggest outsourcing project in all of financial service. Unless the [financial advisors] are trained properly and actually use the new system, assuming it provides the functionality that's promised, it's not going to be any better than the system they already have.”⁴

On January 06, 1914, Charles E. Merrill (Merrill), a broker on Wall Street, founded the investment firm, Charles E Merrill & Co...