New Products
Cloud Computer Giant Unveils New Advisor Offering

California-headquartered Salesforce is introducing a new offering for financial advisors, focused on leveraging analytics.
Salesforce, the CRM platform, has rolled out Wave as part of its Financial Services Cloud product, designed to help advisors identify client opportunities and maximise the use of their time.
“Today's clients have their wealth scattered across multiple banks, wealth management firms and 401k custodians, causing a proliferation of disjointed financial data,” Salesforce said. “Financial advisors struggle to stitch together this disjointed data, and other critical client information, across outdated, siloed systems. In fact, just 7 per cent of wealth managers use technology to segment their clients by age, and none do so by gender.”
The goal of Wave is to empower advisors in a number of ways, the firm said. These include segmenting clients by age group, activity type, investment area and financial goal progress, among other categories. (For example, they can identify which clients were affected by a recent shift in the market or have made a significant deposit, it said.)
Advisors also have an "80/20 dashboard". This is based on the theory that 80 per cent of advisors' revenues come from 20 per cent of their books of business and allows users to identify high-value clients, and prioritise activities and time accordingly. The idea here is that “advisors can prioritise every hour of their day by comparing client revenue against advising activities,” Salesforce said.
Meanwhile, because Wave is embedded in the firm's Financial Services Cloud product, advisors can view clients' progress toward saving for life goals - such as buying a new home or planning a summer holiday. This allows them to provide advice and recommendations to those who are not on track.
Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud - launched last year - also covers client onboarding, account aggregation, security and compliance.
“The advisor-client relationship is no longer just about helping a client to build wealth. It's about helping the client to achieve life goals,” said Rohit Mahna, general manager of financial services at Salesforce. “Wave for Financial Services Cloud gives advisors the ability to visualise personal and market data in the context of their client's goals, helping guide conversations about their investments. It's all about valuable insights that lead to action.”
Wave will be available in the Autumn of 2016.