CRM for Financial Services

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The purpose of a CRM for financial services is essentially the same as a traditional CRM. They’re both designed to manage and build relationships through its functions, databases and automated workflows.

However, CRM for financial services differs in its uniquely tailored functions for the finance sector. They focus on streamlining vital financial workflows and integrating financial accounts more tightly. CRM for financial services by nature has to be different to other CRM systems, as financial services are quite unlike traditional business models. Instead of a direct exchange of payment for a product or a service, customers entrust their financial assets to the supervision of a bank, insurance agency or investment firm. As a result, financial CRM, or at least good examples of it, is tailored to specifically address the requirements of the sector. These include:

• Maximising revenue
• Managing and retaining existing customers and acquiring new ones
• Ensuring compliance with legal restrictions and industry regulations
• Integrate different tools and customer information into a single system

CRM for Financial Services was initially only interested in the management of customers and their details, but as technology and the market has grown more complex, so too has CRM software. Now it’s crucial for CRM for Financial Services to obtain all potentially relevant details about customers, both actual and potential. Including their financial information, relationship with your business, and their activity.

However, when considering higher level functionality, the best financial CRM start to reveal themselves from amongst the merely adequate. The most effective CRM tools are able to accomplish tasks such as creating automated workflows and developing checklists for important actions. Another function that distinguishes the top CRM for financial services is the ability not just to manage clients’ information, but the whole sales process for these contacts, including tracking leads, opportunities and their interactions. Many of the best financial CRM can also track marketing campaigns, both digital or real-life, to prospective clients, and handle communication with them.

 

What Features Should a CRM for Financial Services Have?

 

Streamlining

Account onboarding, portfolio modelling and claims processing can all be streamlined by custom fields and automated workflows. A lot of industry-specific CRMs have pre-programmed workflows, allowing immediate functionality without the need for configuration or modification. This minimises the amount of time wasted with routine tasks, which can be better spent dealing with clients.

Financial advisors usually have inboxes that are way too hectic to manage without the assistance of software. The good news is that tracking email is easily automated. Each new email is built into a client history, and the emails themselves become more flexible and suitable for any device. Communications can also be streamlined by annotating client histories, which helps to glean useful information. This can also allow for personalised messages and service for your customers.

 

Know Your Customer

Know Your Customer (KYC) is a risk mitigation process involving verifying the identity of its clients. This is primarily in order to stop firms from being used for illegal behaviour, whether deliberately or involuntarily. KYC helps you comply with banking regulations and industry compliance measures pertaining to crimes such as identity theft, anti-bribery, money laundering and terrorist financing.

KYC controls usually involve collecting and analysing user’s information, name matching against lists of known parties, determining a customer’s risk in performing illicit activities, and monitoring a customer’s transactions against expected behaviour.

Using KYC improves the CRM’s ease of use, ensures compliance with laws and regulations, and delivers important information about your clients, which can then be used for client account management purposes. The CRM can then use the information to deliver alerts and reports.

 

Analytics and Reporting

CRMs can contain analytical tools such as custom reports and portfolio modelling which can maximise customer relationship value by identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities, as well as addressing customer’s specific problems.

 

How do I Choose the Right CRM for Financial Services?

 

Cost

There are a wide variety of pricing models available for financial CRM. Fees are usually paid per month, but can either be paid per user or for the whole business regardless of the number of users. The price may stay the same, or you may get discounts the longer you stay with a certain system. There may be tiered pricing for different users, so that specialist administrative staff that only use certain parts of the software pay less than full advisor users. It’s important to find the right deal for you; you could be paying hundreds or you could be paying thousands for your CRM solution.

 

Features

The basic features that a financial CRM offers are essential, and do not vary much between CRM solutions. All businesses looking for CRM for financial services require automation and the handling of customer relationships. However, you will also need to decide whether or not your business needs advanced features. You might not currently need advanced features, but as your business grows, your requirements may change. You should think about what these requirements are likely to be, and what functions an advanced CRM could offer to assist your needs.

 

Integration

You may want a CRM for your financial service to easily integrate with other software, so that data can be moved easily between your organisation’s systems. Financial CRM can be very irregular in this respect, as not every system integrates with all software. Even if a system claims to integrate with other software, this may not mean full integration in which a centralised CRM automates workflow between different tools. It may just be that one log-in for one software also works for another, or that raw data is shared between software systems, but it’s still necessary to switch between systems in order to deal with the data properly.

 

Financial services are frequently plagued with disparate data siloes, system integration problems, complex reporting, and a necessity for mundane, repetitive tasks that slow business processes and waste time and money. A CRM for a financial service can easily automate many of the tasks and provide useful information not only to help you please your customers, but to find new customers to please.