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"We are completely one team now," says Michael Lynch, managing director and head of Americas electronic trading at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who points out that all of the combined Bank of America Merrill Lynch order flow now is centralized and all executions go through the same smart order router. "That is true across the board, from sales to execution services and products." Prior to the deal Lynch was head of global commission management at Merrill.
The electronic trading team is currently working out of the former Merrill Lynch offices in the World Financial Center and has been touting the integrated products and services since March, according to Ruth Colagiuri, head of electronic products at the combined organization and formerly Merrill's head of algos, smart routing and crossing products. "The technology teams started working together in the fourth quarter of 2008, and as soon as we were able to have our quant groups sharing information after the deal closed, we began that as well," she reports.
Colagiuri says Bank of America's and Merrill Lynch's electronic trading platforms were 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," she relates, noting that the most interesting integration challenges were around bringing the quantitative work between the two firms together.
"We had two complete sets of algorithm offerings and data sets," explains Colagiuri. "We lined them up and compared similar orders in each suite of algorithms and how they executed in one platform versus the other." The team then evaluated which features on each platform offered the most value and integrated those, she adds.
Lynch notes that the integrated platform incor-porates two of Bank of America's most popular legacy algorithms -- Ambush and Instinct. The rest of the algo suite is rounded out with legacy Merrill Lynch algos.
