Merrill Lynch managers wanted to do something that had never been done before — compress the second-year MBA financial course work into an exclusive, two-week "boot-camp" for newly promoted associates. The program was designed to retain their most promising employees and give them the financial skills and broad business perspectives they needed to succeed. "We wanted to develop an innovative, competitive education program for our junior talent. And Wharton delivered," said Mendy Knowles, Vice President of Investment Banking Learning and Development at Merrill Lynch.
To design the curriculum, Wharton's custom design team brought in Mike Gibbons, Chairperson of Wharton's Finance Department. "He invested an extraordinary amount of time with us," said Knowles. "He listened closely to what kind of finance topics we wanted to cover. Then he gathered six top-ranked finance professors at Wharton and asked each one how he or she would talk about the topics, to see if their style fit with what we were looking for." Gibbons also wasn't shy about letting Merrill Lynch know when they were cutting too much or getting too far away from their original objective of creating a mini-MBA finance program.
The result of this give-and-take teamwork was The Wharton/Merrill Lynch Investment Banking Institute. This one-of-a-kind program has received high praise from the more than 150 attendees and management at Merrill Lynch. Within nine months from the first planning meeting, the first session of the Institute was rolled out in January 2001, followed by the second session that March. Based on the success of the pilot programs, Merrill Lynch plans to hold the Institute on an ongoing basis. "At the end of the first session, two of our associates approached our head of investment banking and told him that 'This program was the best perk you could have given us,'" Virginia Grande, FVP and Head of IBK Human Resources, said. "We wanted to broaden our associates' business perspective by exposing them to the best minds in business education, to bring them to the next level," Knowles added. The course also has delivered a set of financial skills that already is helping the first group of graduates work on client deals that are having an impact on the company's bottom line. "This program has clearly added to our bottom line because we are now seeing associates facing off with clients and working on deals that they would not otherwise have been able to do," said Grande. Another benefit to Merrill Lynch is the opportunity for face-to-face time among associates from all over the world. "Particularly in banking, networks and relationships are everything — the wider the networks you have, the better banker you are," said Knowles.
Wharton's strong planning and logistics support allowed Merrill Lynch to leave its own conference-planning group at home. The design team continued to make ongoing recommendations for improvements, such as reorganizing work groups and setting up social events. "Even before the program ran, the custom team was working to set up a website and an automated registration process. Their work was flawless, so that from Day One, the associates who walked into the Steinberg Conference Center knew that this was a phenomenal program," Knowles said.