Wall Street Firms Begin Delivering More Applications to Senior Managers’ BlackBerry Devices
Unlike most compulsive habits, excessive BlackBerry use can be a positive. Take it from top IT executives at Merrill Lynch and the Blackstone Group. "Most of our investment bankers are addicted to their BlackBerry and look at it every five minutes," relates Alok Prasad, managing director and head of strategy for global investment banking at Merrill Lynch. "They feel kind of left out if they don't have an E-mail in their in-box."
Rather than remove the objects of investment bankers' obsessions, however, Merrill Lynch is feeding their addictions. The firm is giving its investment bankers — whom Prasad refers to as "our most expensive and critical raw material" — new software applications on their devices to maximize their BlackBerry time.
Until recently, investment bankers typically used Research in Motion's (Waterloo, Ontario) BlackBerry devices mainly for E-mail and phone contact, and maybe in conjunction with a contact management application. But over the past few years new BlackBerry-ready applications — such as CRM, knowledge management and performance management solutions — have hit the market, and Merrill Lynch is considering most of them. "The intent is to use the wireless BlackBerry in a holistic way that drives a banker's or senior management's productivity," Prasad explains.
"In some ways the BlackBerry can be more powerful than a laptop because it's always connected to the firm's VPN," points out Ira Lehrman, Merrill's chief technology officer of global investment banking. "You're always on, which is important to bankers' mobility and the agility of getting access to data and information at any point, anywhere. We want to take the next step outside of E-mail, outside of standard applications, and we want to see how we can make people more productive." Merrill is working closely with partners and vendors to develop file access capabilities, productivity tools and performance management tools for the BlackBerry devices, Lehrman notes.
Not that a handheld device will ever replace the desktop or laptop, the Merrill executives quickly add. "The BlackBerry is one piece of the overall solution," says Prasad. Desktops and laptops will always have their place. "We're trying to understand the use case — when people use what. In the office, it's ridiculous to use a BlackBerry to do all your work; a desktop would be more productive," he continues, adding that the firm also is exploring other non-BlackBerry tools that help increase off-site productivity, such as a solution that lets users access their office desktops through a browser so that they can easily retrieve a file or use an application while sitting at a foreign computer, at an airport or client location, for example.
Merrill Extends BlackBerry Functionality
For their first BlackBerry project, Lehrman and Prasad extended a homegrown customer relationship management program to the BlackBerry platform with the help of Boston-based mobile solutions provider Vaultus. Getting the user experience, ease of navigation, data security and storage capacity right were critical, Prasad notes. Lehrman adds that data compression also was an important consideration in order to be able to load large volumes of data onto the small device.
In addition, Merrill Lynch is providing mandated courses, such as anti-money-laundering and e-communications policy training, on the BlackBerry, and as a result has seen higher completion rates, according to Prasad. "As new BlackBerry models come out with multimedia capability, we're planning to exploit that more and more," he says.
This year, the firm plans to create new performance management reporting tools, such as a graphical dashboard, using the real-time information gleaned from investment bankers' BlackBerry devices; Merrill has been in discussion with Cognos and other performance dashboard vendors, reports Prasad. "With the CRM tool now on a BlackBerry, we have more-timely and accurate data. Therefore we can report in a more-timely fashion," he says. "Senior managers can, on a daily basis, understand what our bankers are doing, whom they are calling."
Further, Merrill plans to make human resource tools available through BlackBerrys. And finally, Merrill is looking to roll out wireless daily workflow applications, such as pre-trade clearing and expense report approvals, for the handheld devices, according to Prasad.
One day, Lehrman notes, he envisions senior managers and bankers being able to go a week on the road without logging on to their laptops. "The devices are advancing, their screens are continuously getting better, the profile is becoming slimmer, and the amount of memory is increasing as well as the ability to interface with office tools and read large files such as PowerPoint [presentations] and spreadsheets," he notes.
BlackBerry Lockdown
Because Merrill allows investment bankers to work offline on their BlackBerrys (thus necessitating some data to be stored on the devices), the firm added layers of security beyond the BlackBerry Enterprise Server's built-in authentication, encryption and "kill button," which instantly wipes out data on any device reported lost or stolen. For instance, Merrill added an additional lockdown security capability that can be managed wirelessly. "This is a big balancing act because every security layer conceptually adds a user experience hurdle, but you've got to get the right balance," Prasad says. "We also train our bankers and employees to reach out as soon as they lose a device to minimize the window in which information might be flying around."
While security is a major challenge, the hardest part of extending a mobile application, Merrill Lynch executives say, actually is getting people to use it effectively on a day-to-day basis. It takes time and patience for bankers to input data in the CRM system via BlackBerry, for example, and some people simply are not comfortable with that. "That's one reason why we have a portfolio approach that BlackBerrys, laptops [and] desktops are all part of," explains Prasad. Merrill's target user base is 1,100 to 1,500 bankers, he says, adding that today the firm is 60 percent to 70 percent of the way toward that goal and plans to meet it by late summer.
Lehrman says Merrill Lynch also is considering the other end of mobility — making the investment banker accessible to clients any time, anywhere. "Bankers are on the road a lot, visiting clientele," he observes. "But at the same time, if a client needs a banker, we want that [banker] to be reachable." One answer, Lehrman suggests, is integrating office phones with the BlackBerrys so calls can be automatically forwarded to a banker's handheld device.
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