It's time for me to get back into it.

Invest on the Card

Perhaps the oldest of my favorite projects, I enjoyed this one mostly because of my contrarian approach. 

Early on AXP was looking for ways to generate additional assets under management/sales via direct channels.  Some success had been gained marketing a simple fixed annuity to Cardmembers which used their billing statements as a means to collect payments for the annuity.  A senior leader set as a priority to adapt this process and scale it up to market mutual funds and collect payments this way.

I was told I would be leading this effort and should form a team to get started.  I was also told this project had been attempted at least once if not twice before and failed.  I was also told the leader of the last attempt was very eager to be on my team.

The prescribed method forward was to select 5-8 people for the team, set a weekly 1 hour meeting, and start dividing up the work.  I saw this as a risk.  Several people had expressed interest but none had experience with investments or operations, and the leader of the past team had lots of direction but could not articulate exactly what went wrong before.

Despite pressure to schedule meetings, I chose to first dig deeper into the process.  I worked closely with a member of our law department to get background and ideas, then dug into the details of mutual fund payment processing.  I went from person to person in mutual fund operations documenting the standard process and asking about what we were hoping to do. 

After several weeks I was getting added pressure to start my team weekly meetings, but I pushed back saying it was important to document the process first to help direct the efforts of the team. 

Finally I identified that the key obstacle for the project.  It had to do with the timing of mutual fund pricing after receiving payment – the process took too long.  As part of a large mainframe daily batch process, mutual funds were being priced about 2:00 am each day.  With a little digging, we found there was no reason we could not re-arrange the order of the batch process to price mutual funds well before midnight, thus meeting our required timeline. 

I never did form a team as directed, but solved the problem in just a few weeks.  The key to success was in carefully identifying the problem and being willing to dig deep into the technology of our mutual fund operations.  

The process was documented and given landmark approval by the SEC.  The company even filed and was awarded a patent for the innovative process.