Tag Archives: SalesForce

FPPad Bits and Bytes for December 7

Posted on December 7, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

Remember to watch today’s FPPad On Air broadcast at 4:15 pm ET with Blane Warrene.

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Meet the wealth management firm of the future from Reuters.com

[Technology Tools for Today’s High-Margin Practice is being released in early 2013 as the 10th anniversary of their original book, Virtual Office Tools for a High Margin Practice, nears. It was a privilege to be asked to contribute to the new edition, as I submitted a chapter on collaboration tools financial advisers can use in their business. Pre-order the book on Amazon to lock in the pre-order price.] When David Drucker and Joel Bruckenstein wrote a book about technology innovations for advisers in 2002, many readers were skeptical of their recommendations to use email and create a website.

Junxure Cloud – The Clear Choice for Advisors from Junxure.com

[I will be honest: I think Junxure faces an uphill climb when it releases Junxure Cloud next year. The desktop version has so much in its interface, between notes, tasks, assets, documents, action sequences, etc. that I can’t help but be skeptical how it will translate to a web-based user interface. Junxure provided a sneak preview earlier this year (see: A sneak peek of Junxure Cloud), so take a look and decide for yourself. But give credit to Greg Friedman, the points in this article are valid; there are no overlays like there are in Salesforce, and support is handled internally and not farmed out to a third party. Will those benefits be enough to overcome the daunting interface?] Junxure attended Charles Schwab’s IMPACT® 2012 event, where we announced the spring 2013 release target for Junxure Cloud, our new web-based CRM solution. Attendees were treated to a preview demo, including how Junxure Cloud could help manage workflow, track a firm’s efficiency, and capture client documents and financial data through a wide range of integrations.

Why You Should Consider Online Meetings With Clients from RIACentral.com

[Again and again I counsel advisers that they need to be comfortable using online meeting tools like Skype, FaceTime from Apple, and Google+ Hangouts. Giving your clients options to meet with you remotely, when it is convenient for them, goes a long way in solidifying your working relationship. Here’s a good summary article from RIACentral about four key benefits of meeting online.] Meeting clients online may seem like technological overkill. After all, it’s much easier to just pick up the phone and chat, right? But, in reality, online meetings solve a myriad of practical everyday problems for you.

Salesforce, powered by Orion Connect, gets phone system integration and smarter email reports

Posted on November 8, 2012 by in Portfolio Management Software, Video Spotlight

I’m still not convinced that Salesforce, out of the box, is an attractive CRM for financial advisers.

Most firms need to customize much of what comes with the standard Salesforce package; some succeed after making substantial investments, while others give up, frustrated by the seemingly endless list of things to change (see: Salesforce for financial advisers solicits bipolar reactions; AppCrown attempts to resolve disjointed CRM).

Instead of customizing Salesforce in house, many advisers are leveraging third-party utilities found in the AppExchange. One of those utilities comes from Orion Advisor Services, called Orion Connect.

For details on Orion Connect and several new functions it offers, I spoke with Orion Advisor Services president and CEO Eric Clarke in the video spotlight below.

(click to watch on YouTube)

PODCAST: Daily follow-up reminders help financial advisers maintain strong client relationships

Posted on November 5, 2012 by in Podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS

Zvi Band, co-founder and CEO of Contactually

How did one financial adviser boost his client retention rate from 90% to 98%? According to this Wall Street Journal story, the answer was more client follow up.

So how do advisers target their most important client relationships with relevant follow-up reminders?

One way is by using a program called Contactually.

I’ve been a Contactually user for about a year (likely equivalent to a decade in “app years”). I first wrote about my experience with the program in January for Morningstar (see: Add Automation to Your E-mail Follow-Up).

I recently had the chance to connect with Contactually co-founder and CEO Zvi Band to learn more about how financial advisers are using Contactually to cultivate new and existing relationships and ultimately grow their business. Listen to the podcast of that conversation below.

Salesforce for financial advisers solicits bipolar reactions; AppCrown attempts to resolve disjointed CRM

Posted on October 29, 2012 by in Software

Salesforce.com is like black licorice among financial advisers; they either love it or they hate it.

Just 5% of all advisers who responded to the 2011 Financial Planning Magazine tech survey said they use Salesforce as their CRM. For a CRM widely used in other verticals, financial services just hasn’t warmed up to the program.

So along comes a company called AppCrown (you may remember them as E*Assist back in the 00s) with the hopes of successfully implementing the AppCrown variant of Salesforce in wealth management firms.

Here’s a short interview with AppCrown COO Franklin Tsung on why he believes the adoption of Salesforce.com will grow among financial advisers and how the company’s “pure play” integrations will contribute to its success in the market.

(click to view on YouTube)

FPPad Bits and Bytes for October 5

Posted on October 5, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

Yes, it’s October already. How are you faring on your new technology initiatives for 2012?

If you didn’t attend FPA Experience last week, you still can get a great recap of my Transformative Technology You Can Implement Today presentation from this WealthManagement.com update, From FPA 2012: Transformative Technology That Doesn’t Cost a Dime, and Financial Planning magazine’s story, What’s the Most Important Tech Tool for Advisors?

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Schwab and Salentica Announce Launch of Integration for Independent Investment Advisors from Schwab Advisor Services

[Here’s the history on Salentica’s integration with Schwab: in May 2012, they entered a beta testing, transitioned to a pilot phase in August (see FPPad Bits and Bytes for August 3), and is finally in production to advisers using Salentica’s Advisor Desk. How many advisers can that represent? In the 2011 Financial Planning magazine software survey, 4% of 3200 respondents, or roughly 120, said they use Microsoft Dynamics for CRM. So some smaller percentage of that 120 are probably using Salentica. My guess is it’s less than two dozen.] Schwab Intelligent Technologies and Salentica Inc. announced today that Salentica Advisor Desk™ with Schwab OpenView Gateway™ is available to independent investment advisors after a successful pilot. Advisors who use Salentica Advisor Desk as their client relationship management (CRM) solution can now view real-time information on their clients’ financial holdings within their CRM.

Smarsh Launches Archiving & Compliance for Salesforce Chatter on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange from Smarsh.com

[Smarsh is building off its summer success of releasing Web Archiving (see: Smarsh president Stephen Marsh addresses Pinterest and compliance), and now the archiving vendor captures messages sent through the enterprise communication platform Chatter from Salesforce.] Smarsh®, the managed service leader in secure, innovative and reliable email archiving compliance solutions, today announced it has launched Archiving & Compliance for Chatter on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s most popular cloud marketplace for social apps for business. Archiving & Compliance for Chatter enables organizations to capture, preserve, search, supervise and produce organizations’ Chatter files and communications in support of compliance, recordkeeping and e-discovery initiatives.

Fox and Redtail partner on work flow from InvestmentNews.com

[Back in 2011 I reviewed the latest refresh of Redtail CRM for Morningstar (see: A Popular CRM Gets an Upgrade), and at that time the CRM supported basic step-by-step workflow definitions. In it’s latest partnership, Redtail users can now open PDF files of workflow designs published by Fox Financial Planning Network directly within the CRM. As to pricing, the top tier purchase is around $6,000 and includes full training sessions, workflow system, resource center and coaching, with a nominal monthly access fee thereafter. I’ve seen discounts available for AICPA PFP section members, so ask if you’re affiliated.] Fox Financial Planning Network and Redtail Technology Inc. this week plan to announce a technology integration that allows for “one-click” deployment of FFPN’s comprehensive “client service delivery work flows” onto Redtail’s popular customer relationship management platform.

 

FPPad Bits and Bytes for April 27

Posted on April 27, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Sometimes one is better than two from InvestmentNews.com

[I shared Orion Advisor Services’ new Orion Connect app in the Salesforce appexchange last week. Here’s an update from Davis Janowski with an interview of one adviser already taking advantage of the Salesforce-Orion integration.] Essentially, what Orion Advisor Services LLC has done is meld Salesforce’s customer relationship management application and Orion’s popular portfolio management/reporting application, using Salesforce’s programming interface.

The Top 10 Technology Trends for Financial Advisors, Pt. 2: Increasing Technological Capability from AdvisorOne.com

[In his first technology trend report, ActiFi’s Spenser Segal singles out opportunities to harness business intelligence due to the negligible cost of storing terabytes of data, access to processing power measured in petaFLOPS,  and inexpensive broadband Internet service available today. While captivating in theory, I think financial advisers should first focus their efforts on ditching Microsoft Outlook as their default CRM.] The first trend, Increasing Technological Capability, underpins all the other trends that we’ll discuss in future posts.  The concept of increasing technological capability covers a lot of territory and includes cheaper/faster storage, increasing processing power and increasing bandwidth/wireless speeds.

Orion Advisor Services now integrates with Salesforce through Orion Connect

Posted on April 18, 2012 by in Portfolio Management Software

Advisers using Salesforce and Orion Advisor Services portfolio software now have a new option to integrate their Orion data directly into the web-based CRM.

Orion Connect is a new app now available in the Salesforce appexchange, an online marketplace for applications built specifically for the Salesforce.com platform.

Orion Connect allows advisers to maintain portfolio data, open new accounts, view performance reporting, review billing (shown above) and more.

Advisers using either the Force.com web-based platform or SalesCloud enterprise CRM can now integrate portfolio functions from Orion. Existing users can add Orion Connect for a $15 per month per user fee.

Advisers who are not yet on either Salesforce platform have two options. They can contact Orion directly and subscribe to Force.com with Orion Connect for $25 per month per user, or purchase SalesCloud and Orion Connect from Salesforce for $140 per month per user.

In addition, Orion facilitates migrations from existing CRM systems through a partnership with Redkite, a third-party Salesforce solution provider.

Overall, Salesforce continues to struggle to gain a foothold in the financial adviser vertical (see Is Salesforce the future of adviser CRM?), yet features like the appexchange make it far easier for third party providers like Orion to create their own integrations. If the number of Salesforce integrations with adviser technology vendors continues to grow, Salesforce may soon receive a more inviting reception as a viable option for adviser CRM.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for March 2

Posted on March 2, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

I spent several days in Washington D.C. this week presenting to advisors on new technology that can enhance personal and professional productivity. If you’re interested in booking me for any of my presentations, see my Speaking page for details.

First up this week is my column for the FPA NorCal Planner March newsletter titled When FPA NorCal and Twitter Collide highlighting the “back channel” discussions going on at advisor conferences.

Now on to this week’s stories of interest:

How AppCrown got a big RIA footprint overnight by handling Salesforce implementations from RIABiz.com

[This is an interesting development. Vendors and custodians are gravitating towards AppCrown, a Salesforce overlay and customization provider. Is it because they excel in supporting advisers, or are they simply the only reasonable option among weak competition? I’m not ready to make a decision one way or the other.] AppCrown LLC has come bursting out of the bulrushes to make itself a go-to technology company for hundreds of RIAs who want to use Salesforce customer relationship management software but who also know that they need help — big-time assistance — in making sure that the conversion and connective tissues are there.

Junxure Announces Agreement With Advisor Group to Provide CRM Integration from PRNewswire

[This is yet another integration Junxure supports with a proprietary system, this time being the Advisor Group’s (formerly AIG Advisor Group) VISION2020 portal. Advisor Group has over 4,600 independent financial advisers.] Junxure, a practice improvement firm that integrates technology, consulting, and training, announced that it has signed an agreement with Advisor Group to provide an integration offering financial advisors the ability to synchronize client data between Junxure and VISION2020 Advisor Portal (Advisor Portal), Advisor Group’s proprietary account tracking system. The integration is included as part of the Royal Alliance, FSC and SagePoint Financial advisor technology offerings.

RMB Capital Management Selects Black Diamond and Advent Portfolio Exchange Platforms to Support $2B Wealth Advisory Practice from Marketwire

[Not to be overshadowed by Orion Advisor Services’ announcement of partnering with a $3 billion RIA, Advent is publicizing its deal to migrate one $2 billion RIA’s portfolio data off of Advent Axys to Black Diamond. It doesn’t seem like a tremendous victory to me. After all, I believe Advent purchased Black Diamond to do exactly this: migrate customers on a legacy system to Black Diamond rather than lose them to the competition like Orion and Tamarac. Update: RIABiz published coverage of this today.] RMB Capital Management and Advent Software, Inc. announced today that they will broaden their strategic relationship by migrating RMB Capital Management’s approximately $2B in assets under management (AUM) from Advent’s Axys® to Black Diamond Performance Reporting, LLC’s platform and the Advent Portfolio Exchange® (APX) platform.

FPPad Bits and Bytes for January 27

Posted on January 27, 2012 by in Bits & Bytes

Today is the final day of Laserfiche Empower 2012, where I’m taking in all I can regarding the company’s latest updates to their document management platform. See my prior posts on the event here:

I also created three mini broadcasts of conference highlights from my phone. Listen to them on my FlipZu page: http://flipzu.com/billwinterberg

 

In the meantime, I’ve been collecting the best stories in financial planning technology from around the web this week. Here are this week’s stories of interest:

Mobile Apps: Clients Want Them, Wealth Managers Are Developing Them from Financial-Planning.com

[You can’t ignore the impact mobile devices are making in the way you run your business. I bet over half of your clients have some kind of mobile device, so are you ready to provide service to them using these new channels?] The wealth management industry is adjusting to clients who increasingly expect that they should have anytime, anywhere access to their account information, according to a new study.

Another tool to help re-balance the books from InvestmentNews.com

[Next to document management software, rebalancing software is likely a guaranteed triple-digit ROI for any financial planning firm performing decent trading volume. Here Davis Janowski scoops a new product called RebalanceMax that’s priced well below the market dominators like Tamarac and iRebal.] Financial adviser Rich Chambers set up a side business, Advisor Innovation Inc. (advisorinnovation.com), to finish development of RebalanceMax and begin selling it to advisers on a commercial basis.

10 Top Tech Trends for BDs: FSI OneVoice 2012 from AdvisorOne.com

[James Green provides a decent, but short, list of ten tech trends discussed in a heavyweight panel discussion at FSI OneVoice 2012. Some trends are succinct and all-too-familiar to RIAs, but it’s a good list to keep in the back of your mind. “Integration” appears twice, and Salesforce Chatter is not a social media tool for use with clients; rather, it’s for internal discussion with firm team members.] At the annual Financial Services Institute’s OneVoice conference in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday, Spenser Segal, CEO of ActiFi, moderated a discussion meant to inform the attending independent broker-dealer executives about the 10 top technology trends that are affecting IBDs already and those that are likely to do so in the near future.