The merger of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch was officially completed the first of this year and both teams have been working to combine and consolidate their electronic trading offerings.

Now the Bank of America Merrill Lynch team is officially one and is going to market with its new integrated product offering.

"We are completely one team," says Michael Lynch, managing director and head of Americas electronic trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "That is true across the board from sales to execution services and products."

The team is currently working out of the World Financial Center offices, which are heritage Merrill Lynch and has been touting the integrated products and services for about six weeks now.

"The technology teams started working together back in the fourth quarter of 2008 and as soon as we were able to have our quant groups start sharing information after the deal closed we began that as well," says Ruth Colagiuri, head of electronic products at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

She says the two electronic trading platforms were essentially merged taking a best-of-breed approach. "The new platform shares some of both firms market data, market access, connectivity, etc. so the core platform is the most scalable global platform that we were able to put together," says Colagiuri.

She adds that the most interesting integration work was around bringing the quantitative work between the two firms together.

"You don't get to do this very often but we had two complete sets of algorithm offerings and data sets," explains Colagiuri. "We lined them up and compared them like for like to compare similar orders in each suite of algorithms and how they executed in one platform versus the other."

Colaguiri says that the team them evaluated which features on each platform had the most strength and value add and integrated those. Lynch says the integrated platform incorporates two of Bank of America's most popular legacy algorithms " Ambush and Instinct.

While the Ambush algorithm is similar to a Merrill Lynch offering in a slightly less aggressive form, the Instinct algorithm was different. "It incorporates a lot of Bank of America's quantitative work over the years and is targeted at the small and mid-cap space which fills a gap in our previous offering space," says Colagiuri.

She says the algorithm is suited for stocks that don't trade continuously and may trade in bursts with less predictable volume patters. "It's a great algorithm to be able to market to clients in this environment," adds Colagiuri.

And of course there is the Merrill Lynch dark pool, MLXN, and the Merrill Lynch dark algorithm Block Seeker, which accesses multiple dark pools—both of which were not comparably offered on the Bank of America platform.

"We've incorporated crossing at a number of different levels in our algorithms and will incorporate it further into Ambush and Instinct," says Colagiuri. "The addition of crossing capabilities into these algorithms makes them even better."

All of the combined Bank of America Merrill Lynch order flow is now centralized and all executions go through the same smart order router.