Most institutions have transactional systems for managing and monitoring customer accounts and portfolios, but these systems lack some of the basic, yet critical tools for managing long term client relationships. As a result, most investment managers generally leverage CRM for prospecting and relationship management.
Key solutions for investment managers include:
- Financial Data Integration - Integrating data from third party data providers that help streamline contact management and provide fund allocation and other demographic data. Traders and Account Managers can leverage this data for prospecting.
- Activity Reporting - Activity reporting provides a standard process for tracking conversations with customers or accounts, and sharing the context of the conversation with others in the organization that may be working the relationship.
- Portfolio Analysis - Account Managers need reporting tools that enable them to quickly and effectively report performance, asset allocation, and other key metrics to customers and prospects.
Here are a few more detailed highlights of our most common solutions for investment managers.
Financial Data Integration
Green Beacon developed the Financial Services Data Integration solution to address three issues:
- Sales reps were spending a good amount of time developing prospect list outside of CRM, and had a hard time importing their prospects into CRM.
- Key contacts at prospect organizations change jobs frequently, and updating contact information in CRM could be a full-time job. And
- 3rd party data sources provide information that is not readily available in CRM for their customers and prospect.
The Green Beacon Financial Services Data Integration integrated with leading industry data sets including BigDoughTM, NelsonsTM, and MMDTM, and provides:
- Automatic updates of corporate and contact data in CRM.
- Access to financial data and recent news for a contact, updated daily, through CRM.
- Automatic updates of corporate hierarchies post mergers, acquisitions, or restructuring.
- Prospecting with seamless integration of prospect lists into CRM.
Call and Activity Reporting
Call and Activity Reports provide the ability to capture, in a structured way, the conversations between relationship managers and clients. Clients have used Call Reports to standardize what information is captured after a client meeting, the sharing of the information with other relevant parties, and archiving of the conversation for reference in future conversations with the client. Some organizations send a copy of the call report to the client as a part of their customer service commitment to excellence. Call Reports quickly become one of the most used solutions once implemented.
Referral Tracking
Most CRM tools do not provide a simplified solution for tracking referrals from internal or external sources. For most of our customers, referrals were traditionally sent via email, which was simple to do, but did not provide any tracking as to what happened with the referral (follow through) or visibility into whether or not the referrals provided by a specific source were valuable (referral analysis).
To address this issue, Green Beacon developed a simplified referral management solution. The tool allows users to identify both prospects and referral sources, and create referral opportunities for multiple service lines at the organization. Once the referral is created, it automatically tracks the relationship, providing insight into the value of the referral source and the business from the new customer relationship.
Portfolio Analysis and Reporting
Investment managers need a means of quickly and effectively reporting portfolio performance against goals and the market, asset allocation, and other key statistics when meeting with customers. We are surprised at how many times we meet extremely effective account and portfolio managers who still manually develop these reports for their clients because they cannot generate professional, accurate reports and presentations from their portfolio management solutions. It is not uncommon in large organizations to have numerous different types of presentations that are each created and customized by the individual account manager, leading to a lack of consistence in presenting information to customers and lost productivity in the time required to manually generate and/or collate the presentation.
Because of this disparity, we start by working with the top account and portfolio managers in the firm and defining a best practice set of requirements for the variety of presentations that need to be made to each client type. Using that baseline, our team works with internal IT staff to implement reporting and presentation tools that can generate the required analysis across data sources (e.g. transactional data for real time data, data warehouse for historical data) and deliver the data for client reports and presentations (e.g. in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint formats).
Business Process Management / Workflow
Most investment managers are leveraging integrated CRM solutions for contact and opportunity management, but also for streamlining routine business processes. Implementing business workflow through the CRM tools provides a standard, repeatable best practice for accomplishing complex, multi-stage tasks within the organization. Examples include:
- Customer Acquisition - Setting up a new customer in multiple transactional systems
- Credit Check - Reviewing the customer's credit rating before issuing a credit card or personal loan offer.
- Risk Assessment - Evaluating the risk associated with working with the customer based upon their country of origin, source and use of funds, etc.
Some of the workflows, like customer acquisition, are performed from start to finish by an account manager or other representative (e.g. a teller). Others, like credit checks and risk assessments, require multiple check and potential internal reviews from multiple decision makers before a decision can be made. In this case, the workflow manages the notification and tracking of the workflow, along with the review process and status of approvals. The workflow can also manage annual reviews of certain processes, like an annual review of the customer's risk assessment, by prompting the account manager to review and revise the assessment given new information from the customer.
There are several key benefits to implementing workflow solutions:
- Workflow enables organizations to implement core business processes management and tracking. This process ensured compliance to a standard set of tasks (workflow), managed notifications and exceptions, and eliminated the issues that arise from manual management of these workflows via spreadsheets and email.
- Workflow reduces the time required for approvals both by streamlining the process and by allowing analysis of the bottlenecks in each step of the workflow process.
Organizational Hierarchies
The primary parent-child organizational hierarchy maintained by most customers, and by 3rd party financial data providers (e.g. Dunn & Bradstreet, etc.), is based upon either a legal hierarchy or physical addresses. Sometimes these hierarchies do not capture the organizational structure in a way that reflects how the sales organization is working with multiple locations and contacts in a client organization.
To this end, we have implemented alternative corporate hierarchy solutions that enable individual sales reps to define their own organizational hierarchies. They can share their hierarchies with other members of their team, and define who on the team can make add or remove organizations to and from the hierarchy. This functionality enables the sales reps to organize their clients in a manner that makes the most sense to the sales organization.
Offline / PDA Access
Pyxis Mobile is a leading provider of mobile CRM solutions for Financial Services organizations. The Pyxis platform provides a streamlined user interface, optimized for use on PDA devices or from laptops. Users access data through advanced caching technology, which speeds performance without the challenges associated with traditional synchronization solutions. Green Beacon has partnered with Pyxis to provide offline access to CRM data via the Pyxis platform.
The Green Beacon / Pyxis solution provides:
- Complete offline access to critical CRM data - Companies, Individuals, Incidents, Tasks, Work notes, Forecasts / Quotes - via intelligent caching of data over an internet connection on the PDA or laptop.
- Customization support for specific offline requirements, business rules, and more complex business data.
- Enhanced security during synchronization and automatic distribution of new versions of the client software.