Despite some quibbles, Act For Financial Professionals is a customer relationship management system that is making many advisers' short lists.
Despite some quibbles, Act For Financial Professionals is a customer relationship management system that is making many advisers' short lists.
Updated in November, AFFP from SLM Holdings Inc. of Woodbury, N.Y., is used by almost 20,000 brokers and registered investment advisers.
The forerunner of today's product was created nine years ago as a CRM system for use exclusively by advisers at Smith Barney of New York. It is a highly specialized program that relies on the licensed architecture of the much more general and popular CRM program, Act by Sage, from Sage Software Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz.
The more general sales-oriented Act program has 2.7 million users and 41,000 corporate customers.
AFFP, on the other hand, has been customized for financial advisers, with 1,800 fields geared to meet their specific needs.
Collaboration and calendaring are two of its most popular features.
"Our early emphasis was on the wirehouse firms simply because it is a lot easier to create something for the wirehouses and then bring it out to the [registered investment advisers]," said Jonathan Finkelstein, a Reston, Va.-based principal of SLM Holdings.
KEEPING DATA
"AFFP is based on Act, but that's the end of the similarity. From the ground up, we've built this for financial advisers," he said.
David Ciccone, a Reston, Va.-based financial adviser with Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. of New York, said that his group has been using AFFP for six years and that it is the foundation of his practice, which manages $340 million in assets. "We're on the phones pretty much all day. Making sure that data is readily accessible is of key importance to the functioning of our business," he said.
He said that his group had evaluated several tools including Goldmine, Salesforce, Broker's Ally and some proprietary solutions from another broker-dealer, but nothing met his needs as well as AFFP, which runs on a server in his offices and is available from all the adviser workstations on his network.
There are, however, a few things he'd like to see improved.
"I'd love it if the interface was somewhat more intuitive, but it has worked well for us for a long time," he said. "The only minus that I have is that you can literally lose everything on a client if you drop a pen on your keyboard or you hit it the wrong way."
Mr. Ciccone was referring to an AFFP quirk: Anytime a client file is open, any changes that are made can overwrite the entire file.
Something else he would like to see improved is AFFP's integration with Microsoft Outlook.
"We have a couple interns that have to transfer the e-mails over to Merrill's system for compliance purposes. We'd love for all that to be entirely integrated," Mr. Ciccone said.
Another of the popular features in AFFP is householding, a mechanism that creates link between interrelated contacts.
Jim Hofheimer, an adviser with the Hunt-Hofheimer Team, a Chicago-based group within Smith Barney, said that he likes the program overall.
"We've used it for years, and it's good but not great," he said. "Sage [Software] is not great on the customer service front."
There's a fairly big range in terms of cost. For individuals or small branch offices, AFFP can mean a one-time $500 to $600 expenditure, but costs can run much higher for more customized installations. Specialized configurations and data migration are sometimes included in the package, but these also can cost several hundred dollars or more.
Because of its low base price, AFFP can be less expensive than one of the leading installed programs, Junxure from CRM Software Inc. of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. (InvestmentNews, Feb. 11), or an online hosted service, such as the one offered by Salesforce.com Inc. of San Francisco. The current price for a year's license for three users of Junxure is $1,600, plus an annual renewal fee of $1,100. The price of Junxure's latest release, Version 7, is likely to increase by $25 to $50 per user. A year's subscription to Salesforce.com is about $1,200 a year per user.
Data from a survey of 353 adviser firms conducted in 2005 by Rydex AdvisorBenchmarking Inc. of Rockville, Md., revealed that among dedicated CRM packages, Act had 25% of the market.
While there are several other CRM offerings available to advisers, few have more than single-digit market share. These include Act4Advisors, an Act add-on program from Allied Financial Software Inc. of Alpharetta, Ga.; Advisors Assistant from Client Marketing Systems Inc. of Pismo Beach, Calif.; and ProTracker from ProTracker Software Inc. of Hampton, N.H.
Davis D. Janowski can be reached at djanowski@crain.com.
