Microsoft Advisor Platform—solutions for financial advisors
At the heart of challenges that financial advisors face is the complexity of accessing information from independent systems that use complicated and competing interfaces.
The Advisor Platform enables financial advisors to work more effectively and efficiently across information sources and distribution channels to service clients better. With this platform, advisors gain a more holistic view of the customer and have a better chance of identifying products they can successfully cross-sell. The platform also gives advisors more time with customers and prospects by cutting back on administrative processes. Overall, the Microsoft Advisor Platform provides an end-to-end approach to financial advisory services. This approach begins with enhanced tools for client prospecting and spans every aspect of ongoing relationship management.
Benefits of Advisor Platform
The Microsoft Advisor Platform enables financial institutions to build an integrated multichannel information infrastructure that links systems. This infrastructure helps to grant financial advisors real-time access to client information, research, and data. At the core of the Microsoft Advisor Platform is the Advisor Portal. This portal gives advisors centralized access to resources that are necessary to deliver comprehensive financial advice in a familiar user interface. And portal team collaboration capabilities help to ensure that advisors can take full advantage of the expertise across an institution without going outside the portal.
The Microsoft Advisor Platform can deliver several key capabilities and features, including:
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Integration of sales management, financial planning, and service delivery that spans across the agent (or broker), branch, call center, and the Web
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Monitoring and management of real-time transactions across channels combined with leading-edge analytical tools
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Risk management and compliance control
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Business performance and customer experience management
Competition to gain the business of today's knowledgeable, sophisticated, and affluent client is increasing exponentially.
At the same time, the industry is facing more challenges than ever before. Customers expect around-the-clock, personalized service from their financial institutions. New products and financial instruments have added new layers of complexity in creating and introducing new offerings. Also, the industry is experiencing consolidation and increasing regulatory requirements.
Financial services companies must focus more closely on the customer than ever before, strengthening and expanding their valuable customer relationships.
To create strong customer loyalty—and increase wallet share through up-selling—financial services firms must get to know their customers well. They must build on a solid foundation of exceptional responsiveness to customer needs to deeply understand and connect with customers.
Financial services firms and their advisors have many of their own challenges. To get a comprehensive view of their clients' financial positions, advisors typically must access multiple, siloed applications that often reside in different internal and external systems. Due to the lack of integration between multichannel information, advisors lack a full view of customer assets. Collaboration among advisors (and between advisors and customers) is essential but is often difficult. Financial services professionals must master a growing range of financial tools. And they must find ways to spend more time with current clients and to prospect for new business.
Learn how leading companies are using Microsoft Advisor Platform solutions to empower their employees and grow their business.
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Cantor Fitzgerald Cantor uses a solution based on Windows Mobile software and the Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC to deliver prices and information to users anywhere. The solution helps to ensure that traders are fully informed about market conditions and can manage risk more effectively.
"We have gained a lot more customers, many from our competitors. …It gives us a reputation for innovation and actually sets us ahead in terms of the curve of technology." Alex Huckleby, Head of Wireless Services, Cantor Index
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Thomson Financial Thomson Financial created a smart client application that has improved performance and is opening the door to new business opportunities. This is one example of how advisor platform solutions can help companies improve the customer experience.
"Performance has exceeded [that of] every add-in we had developed previously. And we're better able to meet our clients' needs for financial information…." John Eliseo, Product Development Manager, Thomson Financial
Accenture Financial services companies compete in a global business environment in which speed and differentiation must be achieved while constantly driving costs down. Accenture's business and financial services consulting help banks, insurers, and capital markets companies to enhance their performance to succeed in this highly competitive industry by enabling them to achieve operational excellence and differentiation, setting them on the road to high performance.
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Avanade A joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft, Avanade was formed to merge the strengths of both companies – Accenture's consulting and Microsoft's technology expertise – into a single company, enhancing their ability to deliver effective mission-critical solutions for organizations in all industries. Avanade is the only global information technology (IT) solutions consultancy 100 percent dedicated to using the Microsoft platform to help enterprises increase revenue, reduce costs, and reinvest in innovation to gain competitive advantage.
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Capgemini U.S. With more than 5,000 professionals worldwide, industry leading expertise, and a reputation for unparalleled delivery, Capgemini is uniquely positioned to serve its customers better. In fact, more than 50 percent of financial services firms listed on the global Fortune 500 trust them to move their businesses forward with proven solutions in consulting, technology and outsourcing.
GaleForce Solutions, Inc. Focused in the financial services industry and on Microsoft technology, GaleForce is a customer management solution designed to increase customer retention and profitability while helping to reduce a financial institution's internal operational costs. The solution suite includes GaleForce CRM for Wealth Management, Galeforce CRM for Private Banking, and Galeforce CRM for Commercial Banking.
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Salentica Systems, Inc. Built around Microsoft's customer relationship management solution, Salentica has delivered the functionality to provide financial services firms with the ability to deliver superior client service in a cost-efficient manner. Salentica uses the term "eXtended Relationship Management (XRM)" to describe what they have built around the Microsoft CRM platform.
Financial planning functionality
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AdviceAmerica, Inc. AdviceAmerica provides financial planning solutions that enable the employees of financial institutions to deliver comprehensive financial planning advice and customized investment advice using offline and online channels. Their key products include WealthVision and AdvisorVision.
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Impact Technologies Group, Inc. Impact Technologies provides solutions and services to the banking, capital markets, and insurance industries. The company offers innovative sales, communication, and planning tools that facilitate the sales experience. Impact also helps advisors and their customers make informed decisions by making complex financial concepts and calculations easy to understand.
Reference data providers
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Reuters Group Reuters is a global information company tailored for professionals in the financial services, media and corporate markets. Their information is trusted and drives decision-making across the globe. Reuters has a reputation for speed, accuracy, and freedom from bias.
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Asset Control Asset Control provides a turnkey high-performance data management platform that solves the challenges of acquiring, normalizing, storing, and deploying reference and business data across the enterprise. Asset Control's TAPMaster is an out-of-the-box software product for managing and deploying capital markets and reference data.
Trade order management and portfolio reporting
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Advent Software With a series of solutions comprised of their leading software, services, and data, Advent provides specific markets a complete package of functionality targeted to a firm's unique needs. Portfolio management, reporting and accounting, trading and order management, partnership accounting, straight through processing--complete solutions that are integrated, proven, and reliable.
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Charles River Systems, Inc. Charles River is a market-leading provider of software and services to investment managers in the global institutional asset management, mutual fund, banking, pension, hedge fund, wealth management, and insurance industries. Its Charles River Investment Management System (Charles River IMS) is deployed by the world's leading investment management firms.
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Linedata Services Linedata Services offers comprehensive IT solutions, drawing on the expertise of its three complementary areas of expertise: packaged software solutions, systems integration and application service provider (ASP). LineData's key product, LongView Trading, is a fully integrated front office trade order management solution for global buy-side institutions that offers advanced portfolio modeling, order generation, electronic trading, and compliance functionality.
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Thomson Financial Thomson Financial is a leading provider of financial information and content quality and tools catering to the financial services industry. Covering all key categories, their data and research management capabilities provide enhanced data aggregation, indexing, searching, scrubbing and distribution, enabling reduced risk and increasing operational efficiency. Thomson data can be easily integrated into any proprietary data system to nourish internal applications.
