With the digital age well and truly upon the financial services industry, proper and thorough data collection has never been more valuable.
Adopting a modern, customer-centric approach by leveraging CRM capabilities is essential for firms looking to meet customer demand and stay competitive.
Here are five ways that CRM implementation can benefit companies in the financial services market:
1) Providing cross-pollination opportunities
When B2B institutions come into the picture alongside financial services firms, investment advisors become the gateway to other lines of business and can facilitate decision-making through the customer data that’s been collected in the CRM.
Here’s an example: a client at a bank tells their wealth manager that they wish to purchase a second piece of property.
That opportunity then gets handed off to the mortgage line of business to finance the purchase, and from there, the broker sends it over to retail banking for a potential bundle with a new credit card.
This holistic approach presents several cross-selling opportunities and ensures that clients are met with multiple touchpoints within any given institution.
2) Achieving a 360-degree client view
As a result, advisors and their companies are given a complete view of each client’s key life milestones.
Action plans can then be put into place based on real data that’s pertinent to the client—not a guesstimate using a vague combination of industry trends and demographic averages.
Another bonus of analyzing customer data and having this full picture is that financial services firms can increase market share through account collection.
Identifying that a client has wealth management assets at one institution but credit cards with another company, and perhaps a mortgage with yet another organization, provides a golden opportunity to view the entirety of the client’s assets under management.
Consolidating those assets under one umbrella—by offering bundles, better rates, or other incentives—allows companies to increase their market share and decrease that of their competitors.
3) Identifying spending patterns
Data collection isn’t just about amassing a sea of information—it’s about finding patterns and trends.
With respect to financial services, spending patterns emerge when CRM data is gathered and analyzed. How people spend and manage their money can be determined not only from client activity, but also from the party receiving the money, to create a more complete picture.
Understanding spending patterns is especially critical when it comes to significant investment decisions made by clients—buying a house, buying a car, working on passion projects, starting a business, and so on.
Profiling clients based on these decision-making patterns in their professional and personal lives allows advisors to predict what they might do next. It also provides insights into the overall economy’s appetite for consumption and money lending.
This also applies to burgeoning business entities that are in the process of securing a loan. Studies show that a staggering 90% of start-ups fail in the first three years. It’s data points and patterns like this that help lenders decide which businesses receive loans.
4) Keeping one step ahead of the client
In the fast-moving world of tech, it can sometimes feel impossible to keep up with the latest innovative solutions, regardless of the industry in question.
However, once CRM data collection is in full swing at a financial services firm, advisors can feel more confident that their recommendations are based on real, tangible data, and feel empowered to offer personalized solutions and options to their clients.
With this CRM-derived data at their disposal, advisors are able to drill down even further and fully understand each client’s short- and long-term planning possibilities—from their first home, to their child’s graduation, to retirement, and everything in between.
With the right information, advisors can be ready to facilitate the next step in their client’s financial journey, just as they’re ready to take it.
5) Engineering data
Financial institutions must think of data collection as a science, especially when utilizing a CRM.
It’s not just about harnessing this data, but engineering it to select the right types of data for different analytical processes.
Fortunately, financial institutions have an excellent source of 360-degree household data from which to draw: Statistics Canada gives banks access to data on Canadians, which they can integrate into their internal processes.
With this information at their disposal, financial services companies can more easily ascertain their clients’ next steps at various stages of their lives—going from renting property to obtaining a mortgage to purchasing additional property, for example.
They can then design offers and packages in the financial market that are specifically tailored to their clients’ incomes and assets, gauging where they are and what they might do next.
Think of the last time you saw an advertisement in which a family owning a home was billed as a financial asset: the targeting and messaging in that ad was completely based on data, gathered from all the various touchpoints that a CRM is well positioned to capture.