Bank of American Merrill Lynch has rolled out a new module ofits CashPro Online treasury management portal, CashPro Invest, thatcorporate clients can use to enter orders for short-terminvestments and obtain reporting and information on theirtransactions.

CashPro Invest replaces two other products, Connection andMoneyMarkets Express; B of A acquired the latter when it purchasedLaSalle Bank.

“CashPro Invest is a real synthesis of what was best aboutConnection and MoneyMarkets Express,” says Fred Berretta, globalliquidity investment solutions executive at Bank of America MerrillLynch, noting that the bank took 2½ years to develop thenew module.

CashPro Invest “is completely integrated with CashPro Online,”Berretta says, including having a single sign-on, and its layout is“simpler and easier to use.”

CashPro Invest can also help companies ensure their investmentpolicies are followed. “There's a feature where you can go in as auser and define certain investment policy rules where, for example,you might set a limit for an account or group of accounts, or apercentage limit on a fund,” Berretta says. And if a staffer makesa trade that falls outside company policy, CashPro Invest willeither block the order or alert the staffer that the order isoutside of policy, depending on how the rule is set up, headds.

Customers can access 15 different families of institutionalmoney-market funds via CashPro Invest. It also offers someinvestments that weren't available via all its predecessors,including Bank of America certificates of deposit and repurchaseagreements. Berretta says the bank has plans to add othershort-term investment products as it develops CashPro Invest into“one-stop shopping for liquidity investments.”