Customer relationship management (CRM) and related customer segmentation initiatives are among the top priorities expressed by chief information officers across the investment management industry. These initiatives aim squarely at better understanding clients and their relationships with the firm in order to apply resources where they will yield the best results.
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Highlights
CRM remains one of the top three initiatives of investment management CIOs. That priority is directly in line with their primary goal of reducing the costs associated with acquiring new business and increasing the effectiveness of their sales processes. The specific requirements of these firms are being driven by increasingly disparate and complex products, increased competition, a third-party distributor who is difficult to "know," and a high-cost infrastructure for asset acquisition.
Generic CRM requirements of investment management distributors include integration with shareholder accounting databases, flexible deployment alternatives, personal digital assistant (PDA) functionality, data reconciliation tools, out-of-the-box reports, and integration with popular peripheral applications for analytics or sales force management.
Vendors selling to the investment management industry must bring an understanding of the business and the issues it faces. This is not sale of a technical platform but rather a targeted solution. Vendors with "preconfigured" solutions for the industry are gaining traction, while enterprise players are beginning to integrate segment-specific graphical user interfaces and industry-specific workflows.
TowerGroup believes there will be continued consolidation of CRM vendors and increased competition between remaining vendors. Increasing competition and the better development environments of newer CRM applications will also lend themselves to a proliferation in industry-specific solutions from enterprise CRM vendors. This should have the additional benefit of reducing both the software and implementation costs of CRM solutions.
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