Background

Merrill Lynch is one of the world’s leading financial management and advisory companies with offices in 36 countries. It has three core businesses – Global Private Client, Global Markets & Investment Banking Group and Merrill Lynch Investment Managers – offering a range of services for private clients, small businesses, institutions and corporations, and financial intermediaries.

Objectives

Merrill Lynch needed a solution that would allow its Client Service Representatives (CSR's) to generate client correspondence in a standard manner. The solution had to integrate with existing Merrill Lynch services and a third party PDF generation engine. It also had to conform to Merrill Lynch's proprietary architecture. Additionally, the solution had to generate the data entry screens for the letters dynamically, facilitating the addition of new letters and modification of exiting letters without requiring changes to the application. All of this had to be accomplished in an extremely short time frame.

Solution

Verascend quickly learned Merrill Lynch's proprietary architecture and developed a letter administration tool that allows administrators to import an XML letter schema definition and creates metadata for each letter. The main application uses this metadata to generate dynamic data entry screens based upon the letter selected by the CSR. The letter-specific data captured through the generated screens is then combined with data from other Merrill Lynch services, such as account and Financial Consultant information, into an XML file. The XML file is archived and sent to a third party tool to generate a dynamic PDF.

The project was completed on time and within budget.