BofA and Merrill Debut Private Market Program for Wealthiest Clients

Merrill and Bank of America have introduced a private market program designed for ultra-wealthy customers.

The Alts Expanded Access Program, aimed at ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) clients with a net worth of $50 million or more, is launching this fall, Merrill Wealth Management and Bank of America (BofA) Private Bank said in a Thursday (Sept. 4) news release.

“Traditionally, private market alternatives were the domain of institutional investors, but as wealth building needs have evolved, we’re seeing more clients seek non-traditional investments, fueled by market changes and the desire to diversify,” Mark Sutterlin, head of alternative investments for Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank, said in the release.

According to the release, these funds are not widely distributed and offer access to “specialized opportunities in emerging themes, niche strategies and evolving sectors.”

Bank of America says its study of wealthy Americans has shown increasing interest in alternatives, particularly among young HNW investors, the majority of whom plan to increase their investments in alternatives in the coming years.

“This program is part of our broader commitment to meet the evolving needs of UHNW clients with increasingly complex financial goals,” Sutterlin added.

PYMNTS spoke last week with Jennifer Sanctis, managing director, CashPro at Bank of America, about advances in data intelligence.

“Treasury teams … have so much data, but many continue to be reliant on spreadsheets to do their cash positioning and forecasting,” Sanctis said. “They’re building reports and conducting analyses in a very manual and time-consuming way.”

Depending solely on static, end-of-day reports is like to driving while looking at the rearview mirror, especially as payments become faster and more digital, that report argued.

It’s why the future of the CFO’s office involves identifying the right inputs, applying intelligent tools and harnessing these insights to bring about smarter payments, optimize liquidity and elevate treasury’s role throughout companies.

Bank of America’s answer to the problems facing treasury teams is  a multi-year investment in what it calls “data intelligence,” a campaign to turn CashPro into a predictive, insight-driven ecosystem that offers dashboards such as payments efficiency, cross‑border payments and fraud prevention.

“Treasury innovation isn’t just measured in data, numbers, spreadsheets and systems. Instead, Bank of America measures it in time,” the report added.

Specifically, how much time corporate treasury teams lose daily to inflexible, manual systems. Based on client conversations, Bank of America realized it had a unique edge in solving treasury problems: the enormous volume of transaction data flowing through CashPro each day.

“It’s just a matter of applying the right technology to put it to work,” Sanctis said.