CRM: An Indispensable Tool for Buy-Side Firms

In today’s world, buy-side firms are facing new and rising challenges like never before. These factors not only hinder their ability to grow, but also make the task of managing clients truly difficult. Unfortunately, buy-side firms have been typically underserved in the CRM space because few companies have the expertise and experience to create solutions that fit the industry’s specific needs. In addition, most point solutions have been developed by smaller software firms lacking the resources to implement new technologies and the back office connectivity essential to making a CRM system valuable. This fact, however, should not dissuade a buy-side firm from implementing a top-notch CRM system.

A well-appointed CRM system can help hedge funds and asset management firms bring together and organize all their client information. It can provide marketing and client relationship managers the ability to quickly access prospect and customer information so they can more efficiently secure, retain and serve clients. A CRM system will also organize information, replace internal databases and scattered Excel charts and other ad hoc methods and make data updating, tracking and assimilation simple and time-efficient.

Infinity Info Systems has been working with financial services firms for more than 19 years, developing pre-built templates, workflows and best practices to address their needs. A typical CRM system we develop for our financial customers includes the following:

• Contact information: 360-degree view of prospects, clients, consultants, potential investors and others;
• Investor account management: Tracking who is invested and where;
• Pipeline management: What is coming in/out by fund, by investor account, by date;
• Activity tracking: Who said what to whom (what PPMs were sent);
• Service management: Who is getting what service;
• Business intelligence: Getting actionable info from mountains of data; and
• Mobility: Getting the data you need when you need it.

Customers use specific, pre-defined templates that allow managers to pull together emails, contact information, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, detailed holdings and transaction data into a single database. Various queries and views of the client database can yield information, for example, on prospects (a fund’s investors and assets) and it can tell managers how clients prefer to receive reports. Typical templates include:

• Contact and activity management: Tracks phone calls, meetings, to-do lists, emails sent in Outlook, and manages a centralized calendar;
• Limited partners (LP) administration and service capacity: Tracks historical data, services (K-1s, audit requests, cap calls) and detailed transactional data;
• Pipeline and sales management: Helps managers plan and forecast committed dollars and analyze closed won/lost business (for M&A, deal management and tracking of relevant parties such as PE firms, law firms and investment banks);
• Knowledge extraction and reporting: Helps turn data into actionable information, for example: managers can analyze cross-sell opportunities and manage distribution lists; and
• Mobility: Keeps key client data in the manager’s hands at all times.

A CRM system can be customized to generate specific reports by pulling together client information, history, notes and emails. It can also automate many of the manual processes for creating invoices, monthly statements and customer reports. Tasks that normally take many hours each month, requiring a multitude of resources to collate the data from the different sources, can be automatically generated and sent to specific clients.

A CRM system can also help to streamline decision-making through a business dashboard that contains key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs provide executives, managers and brokers with real-time financial information about their funds, customers and investments. The individual can monitor the KPIs through the business dashboard and drill down into them to make informed business decisions, projections, spot investment opportunities and manage customer accounts. The business dashboard allows the user to easily add any type of information or statistic that is specific or unique to a company or customer.

When searching for a CRM system, be sure to work with a consultant that has long-standing experience with financial services companies. Analyze their practices for implementation and make sure they are asking the right questions of you to determine your needs. A successful company will be more than happy to share this with you and will help you make smart decisions for your business.

Make sure any CRM system you implement can accomplish the following:

1. Create order out of chaos: Pull together contact information, emails, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, holdings data and transaction data from disparate sources into a single database.

Provide business dashboards with KPI so that managers can get a bird’s-eye view of investor activity in just a few clicks.

Connect to optional data from companies like Money Market Directory, Nelsons, Portfolio Management and Partnership Accounting.
Integrate into Microsoft Outlook.

2. Minimize tedious tasks: Automate busywork and reporting, such as client emails, compliance reports and pipeline reports, to eliminate hours of work.

Provide business dashboards with KPIs so fund managers have instant access to the performance of individual investor accounts, potential subscriptions and redemptions by fund, allowing them to make better decisions.

3. Access information anytime, anywhere: Keep your firm connected to its data regardless of where or when you need it. The system should be accessible from your laptop, Blackberry, PDA or through the Web.