Bank of American Merrill Lynch has rolled out a new module of its CashPro Online treasury management portal, CashPro Invest, that corporate clients can use to enter orders for short-term investments and obtain reporting and information on their transactions.

CashPro Invest replaces two other products, Connection and MoneyMarkets Express; B of A acquired the latter when it purchased LaSalle Bank.

“CashPro Invest is a real synthesis of what was best about Connection and MoneyMarkets Express,” says Fred Berretta, global liquidity investment solutions executive at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, noting that the bank took 2½ years to develop the new 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 investment policies are followed. “There's a feature where you can go in as a user and define certain investment policy rules where, for example, you might set a limit for an account or group of accounts, or a percentage limit on a fund,” Berretta says. And if a staffer makes a trade that falls outside company policy, CashPro Invest will either block the order or alert the staffer that the order is outside of policy, depending on how the rule is set up, he adds.

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