Merrill Lynch is transforming its operational
infrastructure in support of wholesale business change using a
service oriented architecture (SOA)
strategy.
The company’s head of global infrastructure solutions, Diane
Schueneman, said rapid change in an increasingly complex industry,
driven by higher customer expectations, regulation and competition,
had forced the company to re-evaluate the IT organisation
supporting company operations.
“A couple of years ago we opened accounts for customers and used
those accounts as wrappers sold by our financial advisors to very
broad customer segments. The focus was on product,” she said.
With an IT budget of £904m, Schueneman set out the scale of change
needed to break down departmental and product silos in order to
move the business to a more customer-centric, as opposed to
product-centric, operational model to improve business efficiency
and compliance.
“We process nine million transactions daily, technical support
takes 17.4 million calls a year and the company produces 12 million
e-mails a day, which I have to be able to recall within 30 days
according to the regulators,” she said.
By moving to a global sourcing model, Merrill Lynch is moving
60% of its 15,000-plus IT and operational staff move into two lower
cost, centralised operational hubs.
At the same time, the IT refresh involved in migrating to these
two new operational centres is being coordinated with the use of
Tibco SOA technologies to help rationalise
and integrate core processing activities so they are more
consistent across the business, as well as scalable and lower in
cost to maintain.
By taking the process centric view of its IT operations using
business process management (BPM) and SOA
products from Tibco, Schueneman explained, “The key is
consistency of process, to provide ‘solutions’ to customers that
meet their ongoing needs, as opposed to products.”
This now includes more self-service, greater personalisation and
more electronic transaction processing.
“SOA and BPM are absolutely critical to our business now,” she
said. They enable the re-use of existing IT investments,
re-organised into services.
“In making the move to client-centric operations, IT has to be
integrated as services and Tibco is helping us achieve that.”
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