ELECTRICAL &

COMPUTER

FACULTY OF ENGINEERING

INDUSTRIAL ATTACHMENT REPORT

Name of Student: ___Jiang Tian________ Matric No. __U084097H______

Course/Year/Training Period: ECE/Year3/10-Jan-2011-1-Jul-2011___________

Student’s Email Address: u0804097@nus.edu.sg_____________________
Name of Mentor: _ZHOU ZHIYING STEVEN___________________________
Name of Company:_Merrill Lynch Global Services Pte Ltd______________________

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 Industrial Attachment Report 1

AT

Merrill Lynch Global Services Pte Ltd.

Reporting Period:

10/01/2011-01/07/2011

Submitted by:

Jiang Tian

U084097H

Dept/Year of Studies:

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The National University of Singapore

Year 3

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ 4

I. INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 5

II. THE TRAINING SCHEDULE................................................................................ 8

III. THE TRAINING ASSIGNMENTS ......................................................................... 9

IV. CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 10

Appendix A: Student Log Sheet ........................................................................................11

Appendix B: IA Report Clearance Form ........................................................................ 12

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Industrial Attachment was indeed a precious opportunity to experience and develop real
life applications. It has given me the chance to hone my analytical skills in solving
problems during software development and to widen my horizons in finding other
alternatives when faced with obstacles. Furthermore, it also developed my interpersonal
communication skills through working with a multi-national company like Merrill Lynch
Global Services.
In the past 6 weeks, I have managed to acquire a better understanding of what the
engineering profession entails and I am certain that I would continue to learn more during
the remaining internship period. This would not have been possible without the guidance
from my colleagues and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them:

• Mr. Steven Hough, for giving me a opportunity to work Merrill Lynch globe
services and introduction of the IA program
• Mr. Andrew Craft, for guiding me on the team’s project and providing me
opportunity to learning new things with colleague
• Mr. Jonathan Tan for guiding me on programming, guiding me on company’s
routine and helping me improve my learning skills.
• Mr. Lim Chin How and Mr. Alfred, for helping me learning the API Unit testing,
and guiding me with patient.
• Mr. Davieet S Patel for helping me understands the QA’s work scope, and
explains the Specflow project to me.
• Mr, Ashkit Sharma for helping me doing the clarification during the morning
scrum.

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 I. Introduction:

Overview of Merrill Lynch Bank of America

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is the investment banking and wealth
management division of Bank of America. With over 15,000 brokers and $2.2 trillion in
client assets it is the world's largest brokerage.
Bank of America is one of the world's largest financial institutions, serving individual
consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range
of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management
products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United
States, serving more than 59 million consumer and small business relationships with
more than 6,100 retail banking offices, more than 18,000 ATMs and award-winning
online banking with more than 25 million active users. Bank of America offers industry
leading support to more than 4 million small business owners through a suite of
innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients in more
than 150 countries and has relationships with 99 percent of the U.S. Fortune 500
companies and 83 percent of the Fortune Global 500.
Following the combination with Merrill Lynch, Bank of America has become:
• The largest brokerage in the world, with more than 15,000 Financial Advisors and
approximately $2.2 trillion in client assets
• A leading provider of global corporate and investment banking services, including
commercial lending, global high-yield debt, global equity and global M&A
• A global leader in wealth management, private banking and retail brokerage

Bank of America Merrill Lynch is a leading participant in the world’s currency markets.
Global Foreign Exchange group trades more than 150 major, minor and exotic currencies
through our network of 18 sales and trading centers worldwide. The company provides
comprehensive solutions to customers:
• A complete product matrix of spot, forward, option and short-and long-dated
interest-rate instruments covering a wide range of exchange rates

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 • Treasury management services that are integrated into our online cash
management platform, offering multi-currency payments in more than 150
currencies and electronic access to the bank’s international payment network
• Retail services, which are used by our banking centers and our clients servicing
their clients, including wires, drafts, foreign transit items, foreign currency bank
notes and foreign currency travelers checks
• Option market-making in vanilla and exotic instruments and emerging-market
currency pairs
• Advisory services providing economic commentary, exchange and interest-rate forecasts,

trade ideas, quantitative risk analysis and option guidance, FX prime brokerage and margin

trading on spot and derivatives

• Electronic Trading Services (ETS) providing depth of liquidity, speed and reliability, and the

advantages of trading with Bank of America

Overview of Equity Linked Technology:

In the past 6 weeks, I have a great adventure in the inside Profits and Loss Team with Equity

Linked Technology (ELT) Department. The ELT Department is consisted of three division Profits &

Loss (P&L), Sales & Marketing (S&M) and Swap. I am in the P&L team. The main task of our team

is to develop a P&L application for the traders to monitoring the daily profits and losses. The whole

application is currently widely used all over the world.

The structure of the ELT is shown below.

Equity Linked
Technology
(ELT)

Profits & Losses Sales & Marketing

SWAT GPAS Params Desktop
(P&L) (S&M)

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As a Multi-national corporation, the ELT team is not only located at Singapore. The
Manager Director (MD) of the ELT Asia Pac is at Hong Kong. Team at different nations
will communicate by Phone conference and Email. Other application associated with
P&L such as PL web and PL explained are implemented by our team.

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III. The Training Assignment
Bank of America Merrill Lynch has intake a lot interns, which makes it more
experienced in training Interns. On the first day, the HR gave everyone a book which
contains the Training plan for the next 6 month, which includes the Workshops and
compulsory on-line learning modules for interns to understand finance business and the
culture of the great company. On these 3 workshops in the past 6 weeks, I have learnt the
core values of the company, the profession in workplace and Diversity & Inclusion.
Those interesting workshops taught me and other intern useful knowledge which may be
quite useful when I start my career. In the first 3 weeks, before I started my ground work,
I did some E-.learning modules about Finance jargons which related to the team’s project.
In the next few weeks, more on-line learning module will be assigned to me to be
finished.

With the help of one of my team member Jonathan Tan, I picked up a new programming
C sharp very quickly. And my supervisor assigned me a job about UI automation, which
is new project supported by Microsoft. Using the white code library, we can access all the
UI items on the GUI to perform basic actions of users. With the help UI automation, the
QA’s job reduced a lot. I encountered another problem, the grid inside the GUI is
provided by other Company, I cannot get access to perform action on the grids. Without
the access to the UI items, some content cannot be get and do the compression. So the
supervisor assigned me another project, which is using the API to sent request and get the
report from the server. In this assignment, the most difficult part is to set up the request
message and deal with the multi-threading. With the help of team member and online
tutorials, I manage to retrieve the report, but the code need some modify and modulated.

Beside the Technology part, the daily meeting in the morning is another interesting
activity, called scrum. It is a meet talking about what you did yesterday and what you are
going to do today. Based on that meet, I learnt a lot about the whole project that team is
doing, and each member’s working field. So I can ask for help by knowing what they do.
And the atmosphere inside the company is very nice. Everyone inside the company are
willing to help me. I learn a lot not only from the project but also from the people here.

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IV. Conclusion

In the past 6weeks, I have a great time working in Merrill Lynch globe services. Beside
the meaning trainings provided by the HR, I have learnt a lot through the assigned project,
as well as working with intelligent people.

First of all, I have a better understand of the Company Merrill Lynch. By learning and
understanding its core value, I would like to be one part of it. I also learned how a
programming teams works on the project. It is quite fun to working with smart and
talented people. Secondly, I learnt that knowing the objective of what you are doing is
more important than how you do it. Before you implement a code for some certain
function, you must know why you want it, which will provide you a clear thought about
how to do it. Last not least is that you should always ask someone for help, if you
encounter some difficult problem. Before you ask, you should search the Google and
Wikipedia first. Asking other smart worker inside the company, you could learn a lot
about the work and project, which is the motivation that we came to the company.

All in all, it has been a fruitful experience in the past 6 weeks and I am looking forward
to the rest of the weeks spent with the company.

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