The company wanted to leverage years of investment in developing processes, procedures, and commercial tools to support the business goals of being a global player in private banking in terms of winning, maintaining, and nurturing current and potential clients (leads). While at the same time, it wanted to create superior sales processes, including those processes that would help, in a sustainable manner, to accomplish the vision of the company.
This project is framed fundamentally in the scope of the private banking and investment business unit of this global financial services provider. It is based particularly on the requirements of the financial advisors for Private Banking (PB), but also it covers the requirements of related business entities such as the business development unit, research, and Corporate Investment Banking (CIB) groups. Last but not least, the project needs to support a digital transformation the company is going through.
There are a few challenges when attempting a successful transformation, starting with the question of costs versus output. Remember how we talked about ROI? How does this company transform and what does it get back from the investment in this transformation? How smoothly and intelligently can it manage the transformation without any major investment and business disruption?
Finally, how does the company leverage the enormous amount of data it is collecting every day and every hour while serving its customers? As the processes and roles in the PB and CIB groups are the most sophisticated when it comes to a CRM solution, we will cover some of them in more detail here.
This is not only related to private banking, but could be applied in any other business where customer relationships are an essential part of the success of the business.
With this new CRM, the company is consolidating all existing business solutions and processes that have helped to successfully grow the business and support the overall strategy of the company. The new CRM should build on the investments of the last few years. This includes integrating the tools that were supporting the daily operations of the business and all 100+ financial advisors.
The new CRM system needs to incorporate both commercial and non-commercial applications, including all the sales tools and processes that were developed with in-house resources.
In the definition of commercial systems, the best practices of a company are obtained through a set of critical processes, information, and business standards, with the main goal of serving each customer or potential lead effectively in terms of advising, relationship management, product offering, and services, in order to win business, develop, grow, and ultimately avoid losing customers.
The company has established a system for each particular segment of clients; for example, the minimum contact annually with a particular client segment (calls and visits (activities)) to guide FAs.
The four main processes that make up the client lifecycle are:
Winning a client (pick-up process).
Nurture and development processes.
Grow customer loyalty.
Management of abandonment and recapture.
These processes constitute the client lifecycle at a very high level and the processes that follow are the supporting pillars. The new CRM solution will then need to bring all these procedures under the same umbrella and build a central repository of client data with role-based dashboards and control panels to orchestrate business more efficiently.
For the pick-up process, which is how this bank is defining the process of winning a new client, success relies mainly on the principles of teamwork and co-management. The teamwork is guaranteed through the allocation of client teams within the company. Each team has several FAs who will have to deal directly with their assigned clients.
Throughout the process of pick-up, which is a company-developed process that is used to identify and manage those potential leads who are susceptible to becoming clients of the company, you'll also encounter those who are nonqualified references (non-qualified leads), references, and opportunities to manage. A client is managed by the new client process when they have spent less than a year with the company. This is reflected in the particular processes, views, and dashboard listings of new clients.
The next step is the nurturing and development processes that are carried out on existing clients. Nurturing is mainly those activities in the day-to-day life of the relationship manager or the FA, whereas development process is about increasing the entailment of existing clients; for example, an increase of portfolio or share of wallet. These processes start with the identification of new business opportunities and go up to the closing of deals.
Next is customer loyalty management. This includes all of the activities developed with the purpose of maintaining and increasing relationship lifetime with the most profitable clients; for example, through specific campaigns and events that are organized for these clients.
After that stage, there's the process of abandonment and client recapture. This is activities developed with the purpose of anticipating (early detection) and managing the loss of customers, as well as recapturing those profitable clients who were lost.
Figure 1.16 illustrates the complex client lifecycle for this company, including the client pick-up stage, the process of onboarding a new client, the nurture and development of a client relationship, improved loyalty management tools, and last but not least, the process of a client leaving and winning them back (recapture):
This company created a very comprehensive customer lifecycle management process for its High-net-worth Individuals (HNWI) whose investible assets (such as stocks and bonds) exceed €1 million.
The sales team consists of different roles from different business units and the new CRM platform, which needs to fully support the complex organizational structure and processes that play a significant role in the architecture of a CRM solution. This is actually an integral part of the successful CRM solution for the company. Therefore, we have to take a closer look at the roles of the protagonists who deal with clients:
Coverage: These people have a clear focus to activate, develop, and increase business with new clients or increase business with a profitable existing client base of the company in order to increase the share of wallet. They are called hunters internally.
Developers: They focus on the relationship with existing clients, right after customer onboarding and throughout the relationship lifecycle, in order to develop new client opportunities.
Research specialists: They support the FA and the relationship manager in the identification of business opportunities, as well as supporting the preparation for visits with new potential customers or with ex-clients. The research specialist assists the FA in overcoming possible objections, while supporting developers with due diligence research.
Middle office: Its mission is to support the FA in putting together financial proposals for investment and customized information specific to the client (comparative evolution of a portfolio, risks, studies, and so on).
Group leaders: This includes the director of the office/branch (if large enough) and is the central piece of the process of management and collaboration. Group leaders report to the regional directors and are able to delegate certain activities to the team leaders. The group leader has, therefore, a superset of functions of an FA and is also directly involved in the processes with clients through winning, maintaining and development, loyalty, and recapture.
Golden Pipe Sales (GPS): Throughout the last few years, the company has developed its own sales methodology, which is a unique sales process (https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-process-) based on its market and products. GPS is a new in-house business solution that is managing these sales processes consisting of a number of processes for the Gold client segment.
FAs and relationship managers start the day with their sales funnels created in GPS. GPS has been successfully piloted and deployed in most branches of the company, and it supports the commercial network of the company across Europe, managed by locations and territories. 70% of the total business is already managed by GPS and it has been proven to be a successful sales methodology for the company. GPS will be on everyone's home page at the start of the day with the new CRM.
In Figure 1.17, we see GPS implemented within a CRM. This starts with lead management, before moving to developing business opportunities, improved customer onboarding processes, and business planning.
All of these processes will be explained in more detail in this book. In summary, the new CRM implementation includes an FA desktop, supporting the definition of roles and organizational structure within the team, supporting GPS processes, presenting related KPIs, supporting commercial workflows, providing role-based control panels/dashboards, and being supported by applications and functions managing the sales pipeline, which is placed on the home page.
The implementation of the system articulates through use cases, which are associated with activities and are monitored by a reporting tool that lists the client activities. GPS was developed with only one goal: to support processes and provide transparency to business leaders by monitoring the activities of clients and FAs. It needs to integrate with an automated agenda of activities and facilitate the change management that is crucial to streamlining the consultation processes. As the processes have been successful, the company decided to extend the GPS both in functionality and territory.
All offices will receive the new CRM system, as well as extended functionalities of GPS, including automated agenda management, individual KPIs, and control panels, so that all FAs of the commercial network can use the new enhanced system based on the success of GPS.
All of this will help to build a centralized repository of all sales activities that are aligned with and supported by a global network of investor relationship specialists. This will enable better business insights and orchestration, which will be a supporting pillar for continuous business improvements and even higher profitability in the coming years. The solution provides a portal enabling the FAs to have a better insight into their clients, sales pipe, activities, and more. The main function is to provide a client 360-degree view.
The portal includes the most critical operations of an FA, including:
The control panel, the entry page, or home page: Mainly for the FAs and investor relationship managers. This page provides a quick view of daily activities, emails, and business-related alerts. It is the starting page to search/look for all related elements. It includes a dashboard for the FAs, which is individually tailored for each member of the team. The page also supports extended GPS processes for users such as FAs, relationship managers, and administrators, along with supporting the consultation process and financial planning.
The client card: Allows FAs to consult and store commercial-related data about their clients. It's also the integration point with other systems; for example, the order entry. This is an extended 360-degree client view, which we will cover extensively in the next chapter.
The client flash: This page gathers and displays the most important information about the client; for example, position holding, transactions, last activities, conversations, and more. It provides a quick snapshot of the business in terms of a particular client.
Identification and qualification: This page contains client information coming from the back office (current addresses, accounts, nationality, and so on). Also, it provides information about the sales team that takes care of this client and opportunities. Also included are qualitative documents (financial planning, assets, and so on), a professional profile of the client, opportunities, objectives, family data, and more.
Business actions: The management of business activities with clients. This data is extended and migrated to the new CRM system to support sales process automation and related data for regulatory authorities, such as the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID).
Holding: This page lists the positions of the client for any member of the client team. It allows for tracking loss and gains, movements of the account, and the composition of the portfolio (distribution of assets).
Share of wallet: On this page, the FA maintains information about the position that the client has with an outside company/competitor. It includes the share of wallet and also serves to highlight the interest that a client can have in other products (NBO).
Order entry: This page is simply a link to the application for order entry. This will be later realized natively in the new CRM system.
Notification archive: Provides the FA with a list of documents and notifications sent to his or her clients, allowing them to search, filter, sort, and print notifications sent to clients.
Documentation: For each client, group of investors, or corporate accounts there are obligatory documents that are scanned and stored in the file system. Under this page, the FA is provided with functions to manage and explore documents scanned for each client. This also supports the MIFID and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) processes.
Account planning: Here the relationship manager will do their account planning, see account-related notifications, see consultation plans, get alerts, and follow up on tasks.
100 days: The company strongly believes that the first 100 days of the client life cycle are the most valuable for building a strong relationship and for cross- and up-selling opportunities. Here the FA will follow the processes for nurturing and building a long-lasting relationship with new clients.
Sales management: The FA will follow and monitor the progress of leads and consider opportunity management. This page keeps information regarding client telephone calls and visits (call reports) and turns a lead to an opportunity, which should turn into a client. This is basically reflecting the GPS processes.
Intermediation: Related to the intermediation of the type of news, analysis, and documents.
Learning: Contains the list of mandatory and recommended training and compliance courses, readings, questionnaires, and the tracking of the completion of mandatory courses.
Markets: Quotations of the different indices and values that have the ability to capture historical data and export it to Excel.
Financial planning: Designed to hold general information regarding the financial planning of the client and the investment objectives. This tool collects data that is duplicated in other systems including a profile of the client, the personal data of the client's contacts, their objectives, and a proposal. This is a mandatory process for regulatory authorities in most countries.