SIDEBAR: Successful Partnering
Tips from the top on the keys to working with your vendor
James Gorman, executive VP, Merrill Lynch's Global Private Client Group
- Think about negotiations as a way to learn more about your company's needs and your partner's capabilities.
- Make it very clear to your partner that negotiations are not the crux of the relationship; they're just the first step in the formation of a long-term arrangement.
- Ensure that the partnership is not too one-sided, that each partner has as much at stake as the other.
Byron Vielehr, co-head and CTO, Merrill Lynch's Global Private Client Group
- Get executive sponsorship from the business.
- Take a pragmatic view of the contract you strike. Understand that you can't cover all the situations you're going to face.
- Make sure you get the organisation behind the project. You don't want people poisoning the well from within.
- Acknowledge problems and successes as they happen.
SIDEBAR: What $US1 Billion Buys
Merrill Lynch's New Workstation
- Project: New wealth management workstation
- Goal: To provide Merrill financial advisers with a fully integrated desktop that incorporates market data, financial planning tools and CRM capabilities
- Cost: $US1 billion over five years
- Major vendors: Thomson Financial (general contractor), Siebel (CRM), IBM (branch support), Dell (hardware), Microsoft (integration framework), AT&T (network), HP (network products and services), Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (systems integration and Web site development)
- Workers on project (including vendors): More than 400
- Financial advisers served: 14,000
- Desktops on platform: 25,000
- Desktop specs: 2.4GHz Dells, 1GB RAM, two 18-inch flat-panel monitors
SIDEBAR: An Opposing View of Build Versus Buy
UBS Financial Services keeps its new workstation in-house
Merrill Lynch is not the only company revamping its financial advisers' desktops. UBS Financial Services now is rolling out its new platform, ConsultWorks 2. Like Merrill's, UBS's system is Web-based and integrated so that advisers can navigate between some 125 applications. Like Merrill's, UBS's legacy platform was not well-integrated. Unlike Merrill, however, UBS is building its new system in-house.
"When we looked at what we could buy, we saw many good point solutions, [but] we didn't see anything that met two criteria: a high degree of integration and a degree of nomadic access from anywhere in the world," says CIO Scott Abbey. He believed that his IT department's experience building and working with the previous version of ConsultWorks made it the best choice to build the new desktop. And a UBS spokesman adds the company "spent significantly less" than UBS's rivals have cited.
After a pilot test last year, UBS rolled out the workstation to its more than 8000 financial advisers this northern spring. This month marks the halfway point of the rollout, which should be complete by year's end. Though UBS has publicly announced it's using Reuters Plus Web as its market data application, it won't reveal other vendors involved in the project.
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