Today's clients have their wealth scattered across multiple banks, wealth management firms and 401(k) custodians, causing a proliferation of disjointed financial data.
"Many advisors feel as if it's quite foggy when they're looking into their client," Rohit Mahna, general manager of financial services at Salesforce, said during a phone call with ThinkAdvisor. "Maybe they know one or two things, but they don't have insight into everything. Or maybe the data is in five, 10, 15 different systems and it's difficult for them to stitch it together."
On Thursday, Salesforce announced a new application embedded in its Financial Services Cloud that will enable advisors to leverage clients' analytics and data in one spot.
The new Wave for Financial Services Cloud app, which will be generally available in fall 2016 at no additional charge for cloud users, will allow financial advisors to stitch together this disjointed data, and other client information, across siloed systems.
"Something that we've heard constantly is that data is never the problem," Mahna said. "Everyone has tons of data. The advisor has data, their home office is sending them data, they're buying data [and] they're getting social data. The problem is it's just a jungle of data. And it can be overwhelming for these guys. They don't know how to navigate through it."
The goal of Wave is to give advisors the ability to pull this disparate data together, segment their clients more effectively, and then act on these insights to achieve success for their clients.
Within Wave, advisors will be able to segment their clients by age group, activity type, investment area, financial goal progress and more. Advisors will be able to quickly identify high-value clients, and prioritize activities and time accordingly. Advisors will also be able to identify which clients were affected by a recent shift in the market or have made a significant deposit and now require extra guidance on their holdings.
Because Wave is embedded directly into the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, advisors will also be able to create tasks or flag opportunities based on client insights without leaving Salesforce.
