Integrated relationship management suites are relative newcomers to the market, but these solutions have great potential for furthering the adoption of CRM as a business strategy in financial services. Integrated relationship management suites provide the core elements for CRM and, because the suites are implemented as a single piece of software, the users are able to receive strong functionality without the expense and effort of a custom project. For many financial organizations these suites represent a relatively safe entry to CRM—broad functionality at a reasonable cost with simplified implementations.
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Integrated relationship management suites have been on the market for a relatively short period of time, but their functionality and system flexibility will enable them to meet the customer relationship management (CRM) needs of broad sectors of the financial services market. While these suites will have great appeal for middle market banks in $3–50 billion in assets range, the suites will also be used in other sectors of financial services such as insurance, brokerage, and asset management. Finally, these suites are also likely to be used as a departmental solution within very large organizations that have already started to create a custom data warehouse.
While three vendors—Customer Analytics, E.piphany, and Fiserv—have created integrated relationship management suites, other organizations have begun to create "pseudo suites" that bundle a modicum of the functionality required for CRM into a package. Unfortunately these pseudo suites do not provide as high a level of functionality as the integrated suites and they require considerable effort to integrate them into the FSI’s IT infrastructure.
The strength of integrated relationship management suites is their ability to provide strong CRM functionality embedded within a single piece of software. Prior to installation, users can be certain that the modules will work together and that the system has been optimized to provide easy and seamless use. Installation time is abbreviated and time to market can be maximized.
Of the three suites profiled in this TowerGroup Research Note, two have focused their efforts solely on financial services. Customer Analytics and Fiserv have developed suites that are optimized for the specific needs of financial services while E.piphany has chosen to serve a broader array of industries.
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