Developers of computer technology strive to simplify tasks or increase efficiency, but all too often, they make things more complicated.
Not so for the creators of Orion Connect, a Salesforce App Ex-change application, which improves work flow in a way that is resonating with big registered investment advisers.
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.
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Visit our accompanying slideshow by clicking this link or the “Orion Connect” link in our photo gallery box at left)
“Data calls and requests come from the CRM system to Orion, and our system recognizes what CRM the request is coming from — in this case, Salesforce — and then renders that data right into Salesforce as though it were a native Salesforce page,” said Eric Clarke, president of Orion.
BLENDING OR OVERLAY
Think of Orion Connect as a blending or overlay of the two applications, giving advisers the best of both. Financial advisers who use Orion Connect now can log in to their Salesforce CRM and stay there without moving to another interface, while using a nifty dashboard that has all the same Orion features they already use.
A big impetus to developing the application was that several of Orion's large RIA clients already use Salesforce. In fact, Orion's internal staff and its sister registered investment advisory firm, CLS Investments LLC, which manages $7 billion in assets, also use Salesforce.
“I kind of get goose bumps about it,” said Jim Anderson, chief systems officer at CLS.
The firm's various teams began migrating to Salesforce in 2009 after using a mixture of applications, including Microsoft Dynamics and task-specific software such as a case-tracking program.
“We are going to gain huge efficiencies in that we will have to enter things only once. Improvements with our client on-boarding process alone are going to make this worth our while,” Mr. Anderson said.
In addition to CLS, 20 other RIAs have lined up to begin using Connect, including Abacus Wealth Partners LLC, ITS Asset Management LP, McNamara Financial Services Inc. and Mariner Wealth Advisors.
J.D. Bruce, a managing director at Abacus, said that a big part of his firm's decision to move to Orion's reporting platform last year from Schwab PortfolioCenter came about because of the Salesforce integration.
His firm, which has $700 million in assets under management, had migrated to Salesforce from the Act CRM product in 2006.
Mr. Bruce said that the move created the same sort of efficiencies at his firm as those noted by Mr. Anderson at CLS.
Thanks in large part to the efforts of some of the firm's senior partners, who have written books and speak publicly, as many as 15,000 investors contact Abacus for information every year, though many of them are don't meet the asset minimum to be taken on as clients. This has posed a problem for the firm's marketers.
“The missing piece has always been getting all the client's financial information out of PortfolioCenter and into Salesforce,” Mr Bruce said. “We tried many approaches, but nothing worked, because they were either inelegant or too complex."
In a step that is sure to drive sales, Orion's agreement with Salesforce to be a reseller of the application permits it to offer Salesforce licenses for $25 per user per month.
Orion is also working with another popular CRM system, Redtail Technology, to do largely the same thing. Completion of that project is at least a month away.
SOCIAL-MEDIA LESSONS
Financial services technology research firm Corporate Insight has released its “Social Media Leaders” study, the findings of which are applicable to the work of advisers.
In its analysis, the firm focused on the “social properties” of 90 financial institutions. Its major finding: Content is king.
“The same keys apply to advisers that apply to any successful social-media campaign that is business-related,” senior analyst Alan Maginn said.
First, it isn't enough to have a simple social-media presence. Firms also must provide well-thought-out and focused content.
Second, Mr. Maginn suggested that advisers in particular could benefit from a way to target their content to home in on a particular audience — perhaps a specific client type, instead of investors in general.
And all those advisers who worry that they are behind in this realm are in good company.
The study found that very few mutual fund and exchange-traded-fund firms have been able to generate a substantial amount of interaction among their Facebook fans, especially when compared with the rest of the industry.
According to the report, the average number of Facebook fans among the top three firms — The Vanguard Group Inc., Allianz Asset Management of America LP and J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. — is just 17,000.
Related:
Slideshow of the Orion Connect interface
djanowski@investmentnews.com
