Customer stories


Merrill Lynch

Merrill Lynch Investment Managers Australia consolidates customer contact information with a centralised FileMaker Pro database

Business Challenge

Merrill Lynch is one of the world’s leading financial management and advisory companies with offices in 35 countries and total client assets of approximately US$1.5 trillion. Merrill Lynch's asset management group, known globally as Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, manages more than A$676 billion for clients around the world and approximately $A8 billion in Australia, as at December 2004.

Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (MLIM) Australia undertook a comprehensive review of its Retail Sales technology and identified a need to improve its customer relationship management (CRM) system, to enable the sales teams to better target clients and prospects. Information from multiple sources needed to be integrated into a single sales "front-end" in order to provide a useful technology platform for the Retail Sales team.

Successful Solution

MLIM commissioned a developer, Impact CMS, to customise a FileMaker Pro based application to meet the business’ CRM requirements. The new application, Client Intelligence Advantage (CIA), provides a dedicated sales database, integrated into the core systems, and a single view of the customer in a format that is specifically designed for a business development manager.

The customised CRM system by Impact CMS was selected following a review of competing products. The FileMaker Pro based system offered value for money and met with the functional requirements of MLIM’s sales teams. The system was also able to be easily customised to suit industry specific requirements.

Customer Benefits

MLIM sales staff are able to:

  • View all of the relevant qualitative and quantitative information on a client or client group from within the one system.
  • Work with Found Sets of group clients to arrange functions and events that are targeted to clients with particular interests.
  • Send email correspondence to a client or group of clients directly from the application and have the details of the email recorded against the client’s contact history.
  • Manage regular publication mailing lists from a single system.
  • The field sales team and Adviser Services call centre team can now work together more efficiently, as a central system is now available for use by both teams with a full client contact history.

    Sunderland said, “Streamline, built in FileMaker Pro, has revolutionised my business. With its introduction I got my sanity back and more time to work on what I enjoy - being creative! We now easily capture creative and account management time plus all our supplier and third party costs, which means we can invoice confident in the accuracy of our data. In the five years we’ve been using it we’ve improved agency efficiencies by 100 percent and subsequently profitability by 100 percent. As well we’ve kept our good staff longer and built long term client relationships based on trust. ”

    “FileMaker Pro provided us with a very cost effective and reliable platform on which to build our CRM solution. The FileMaker Pro based Client Intelligence Advantage provides our sales team with a single, definitive source of customer information and a suite of tools to make it easier for them to deliver excellent service to our clients.”

    John Hanrahan, IT Director, Merrill Lynch Investment Managers Australia



    Contact information

    Contact Info for Customer:

    Merrill Lynch Managers Australia
    +61 2 9225 6500
    http://www.bluechip20.ml.com/default.asp


    Filemaker Contact:

    Colleen Elcham
    Marketing Coordinator, Asia Pacific
    FileMaker Inc.
    +61 2 9641 8084
    colleen_elcham@filemaker.com
    http://www.filemaker.com.au


    • Merrill Lynch