The Benefits of CRM for the Investment Sector

CRM software as a generic product has seen great successes. We’ve seen white papers touting boosts in profits and efficiency, case studies pushing company turnaround and market dominance.

Over the last few years, developers and resellers have been pushing into ever more refined niches, customising their offerings to appeal to a wider range of businesses. Whilst a generic CRM can of course do much to better business, software developed for a specific niche are even more effective in ensuring you get the most out of your business processes.

Never has this been more true than within the financial and investment vertical, where accuracy of reporting and communication are of paramount, if not legal importance. Luckily, there are a number of versatile and scalable solutions out there that can improve a wide range of the processes required.

The stronger the fund grows, the more investors get on board, the more difficult managing your communication with them becomes. At some point, the traditional tools we use to communicate just can’t cope with the demands of investors, and as a result, relationships with investors break down, are stunted, or poorly managed. A CRM offers a flexible solution for not only improving the frequency of contact to investors, but more importantly the quality (you can find out more about investor communication and retention in our previous post).

Transparency is becoming an ever more important factor for hedge funds. Increased regulation and scrutiny of hedge funds in general mean that investors want to know more about what’s happening within the fund. This means they need a flexible and versatile range of options for accessing the information they want, when they want it.  

Whether it’s through an extranet or with customised reports, a CRM has the ability to meet the requirements of reporting.

An extranet is similar to an intranet, but access can be granted to external users by way of login. This allows investors to log in from anywhere at any time and access the data they want. The major bonus of an extranet is the ability to track investor interaction with the data, allowing you to track and react to the most important aspects of the data to individual investors, which can be fed into customising reports tailored to their needs.  

When reporting is customised to the needs of the investor, it can be incredibly beneficial. Not all investors will want daily reports, many will be happy with lower frequency reports; many will want to know of certain metrics, others will want to see performance benchmarks. This can cause problems with reporting, especially without CRM capability. Segmentation of investors through the CRM by their reporting needs will allow you to automatically generate and report on just the metrics they require, when they require it.

Integration with a CRM system means data collation and collection is easier than ever, data share between departments is streamlined, and as a result, reports are simpler to generate. Without integration, this data would have to be mined from several unconnected systems, then collated and formatted into something presentable, meaning a good deal of time will need to be invested, meaning consistent, high frequency reporting is almost unworkable for a large number of investors. Whilst this isn’t a unique benefit of CRM for the investment sector, integration is certainly a necessity.    

The investment world has changed. Under ever more scrutiny and requiring an ever more accurate and transparent means of reporting, an investor CRM has never been more suitable. As requirements change so will the software, enabling the sector to react and respond to the needs of its investors.