IBS Journal Supplement 2015
Time, patience and tenacity
Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) has made significant strides in its attempts to consolidate its vast global treasury business onto a single payments platform, Fundtech’s Global Payplus-SP. The bank was one of the pioneers of the revamped SOA version of Global Payplus, and has made steady progress towards a new global platform.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s (BAML) efforts to consolidate its global corporate banking business onto a single technology platform have been the focus of over three years’ worth of work. The project falls under the bank’s major ‘Wholesale Model Bank’ initiative, which is a multi-year strategy to rationalise, modernise and replace many legacy systems and infrastructures across its international business. Payments and treasury management have been the main focus to date, but other initiatives, such as demand deposit accounts, are also due to come under the scope of the project in the near future. ‘When we started the project, we really
looked to completely replace our existing infrastructure. The legacy infrastructure from a payment standpoint was a single system that supported all of our branch- es outside of the US, both low-value and high-value,’ says Cindy Murray, managing director, global treasury product platforms and e-channels at BAML. The complica- tion for BAML was that the system was designed to process low-value the same way as a wire, so it didn’t support true batch processing, and there were capaci- ty issues in dealing with high-volume pay- ments. The new rules around SEPA pay- ments transactions acted as a catalyst for the bank to standardise its systems on a common platform, remarks Murray. ‘With the SEPA mandate, and with so many coun- tries moving from the local ACH networks to the SEPA network, we felt that there was a significant opportunity for our clients to consolidate and move to a single account and single provider and really concentrate on the SEPA processing.’ BAML was one of the pioneers of the
newer SP (standing for services platform) version of the vendor’s Global Payplus
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offering, which promised a new Service Ori- ented Architecture (SOA), straight-through processing (STP) and a single shared- services framework that is platform inde- pendent, based on an open architecture and an XML-based data model. Towards the end of last year BAML achieved a major milestone of the project, completing the roll out of the main ‘pipes’ of the new plat- form, supporting its EMEA clients. ‘We have built out the platform to support SEPA, ISO 20022 and mass payments. This also meant that in addition to the Fundtech platform, we had to build the pipes for mass pay- ments outside the US so clients could send us a high-volume file with a lot more data than they do today on our legacy platform. At the same time, we understood that when you are doing batch processing and mass payments, there is a need for all kinds of reporting that you normally don’t pro- vide,’ says Murray. The client migration process from the
old platform to the new is now underway, explains Murray. ‘We are migrating our cli- ents which originate SEPA credit transfer and direct debits from the legacy platform onto the new platform. When you look at total volume of all of the low-volume clear- ing in 15 countries in EMEA, that includes some of our partner banks that we clear with, that volume represented 30 per cent of what was on the legacy platform,’ she says. ‘We have already moved a good pro- portion of them, but we will be completing that migration by the end of this year.’ One of the challenges BAML has faced
during the project has been to keep a standard customer experience for its major clients whilst achieving compliance with multiple local regulatory guidelines. This has involved a lot of customisation related to specific requirements, adding further
case study: baml
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