Advisor Desktop Portal solutions
Stand out as a financial advisor by enabling your people to achieve higher quality and more profitable relationships with your customers by equipping them with integrated information delivery and business process solutions from Microsoft partners. The familiar, easy-to-adopt advisor desktop portal solutions provide a holistic view of your clients that enables you and your people to better identify appropriate products and services for each client and to deliver secure, state-of-the-art client and co-worker collaboration across distribution channels.
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Business challenge
Even if your financial advisors offer the best services in the market, it can still be hard to set your business apart from the competition. To establish—and maintain—an edge over your competitors in today's market, you and your people must successfully meet several specific financial advising challenges:
| • | Increased need for detailed, close customer relationships. Sophisticated clients, as well as employees who manage and supervise financial advisory services, increasingly demand high-quality personal service. That means your people need to meet with customers more often and provide them with more detailed information. In order to provide that kind of service, they must be able to quickly and easily access and manage valuable customer information, instead of having to search for it across disparate systems and business processes. |
| • | Security and communication limitations. Your people need to take advantage of the full power of online transactions and communications to quickly move crucial information, and they need to keep that information secure in the process—regardless of channels, processes, product specialty areas, and geographical location. |
| • | Complex operations and high costs. The faster your business grows, the more complex your operations can become. This can lead to higher costs in time, support, and human resources. |
Solutions
Microsoft works with its extensive partner ecosystem to provide innovative solutions that help meet these financial advising challenges, empowering your people with real-time access to integrated client and industry data, from the first point of contact through the life-long advisory relationship. This increases your people's ability to work closely with customers to advise, propose solutions, cross-sell, and up-sell.
These solutions can enhance response time to customer opportunities by providing timely and secure access to specialists, service professionals, and information from many sources. They also empower your people to custom deliver that information to the client through whichever electronic vehicles fit their specific needs. All this personalized attention is conducted with industry-leading security and privacy technologies, such as rights management and group policies, which are integrated into a broad range of business processes at every step.
Built on familiar, easy-to-use Microsoft technology, these financial advising business solutions will improve your operations and decrease training costs and administrative time. They can also reduce low-value administrative tasks by building those functions into a familiar and simple advisor desktop solution. This frees your advisors to spend more time with existing clients and to seek and cultivate new ones.
Many financial advising companies have already taken advantage of advisor desktop portal solutions to help them identify and implement appropriate solutions, products, and services to successfully meet their specific challenges.
Case studies
Read these case studies to learn how companies have used advisor desktop solutions.
Fidelity Investments (Word document, 455 KB)
Fidelity Investments utilizes Microsoft .NET and other Microsoft technologies to enable brokers to easily manage customer accounts while gaining real-time access to Fidelity financial products. This empowers their people to better serve customers while improving the sales of financial products. Other benefits include simplified deployment and working with a familiar Microsoft Windows interface.
AXA Financial (Word document, 412 KB)
With the help of an identity-management solution based on Microsoft Identity Integration Server (MIIS) 2003, AXA Financial, one of the world's leading providers of insurance and other financial products and services, is automating the management of its identity life-cycle processes. This will help the company synchronize identities across enterprise stores, lower administrative costs, and simplify the sharing of strategic information with business partners. The MIIS identity-management solution will also help the people at AXA Financial centralize and consolidate its overall business rules and establish a foundation for further streamlining its employee identity information practices.
Thomson Financial (Word document, 237 KB)
The Investment Management Group at Thomson Financial created a smart client application by replacing the communication layer in its Microsoft Office Excel add-in product with XML-based Web services. The results: improved performance and new business opportunities.
Business benefits
By implementing advisor desktop solutions built by Microsoft partners using innovative Microsoft software, you and your people can experience the following benefits:
The ability to deliver higher quality personal service.
Microsoft and its partners help you and your people bring your more sophisticated clients and regulators the personal service they demand, including more communication and meetings, faster reporting on clients' valuable information, and timely, strategic financial and product advice.
Easy access to and management of critical information.
The unified nature of Microsoft technology and platforms keeps critical customer information close at hand and easy to manage for your people, whether they're at the desk, at home, or on the road.
Easy collaboration.
When your people and your customers can work together smoothly from different locations, they can leverage the full power of electronic transactions and communications. Microsoft technology can make this process simple and intuitive.
Secure transactions and communication
Through advanced technology, such as rights management and group policy, Microsoft and its partners provide superior attention to security and privacy at every step, regardless of channels, processes, product specialty areas, or geographical location.
Improved operations and reduced costs.
Less time spent searching for varied types of information and worrying about lost communication means that your people can focus on what matters: building strong client relationships and driving profitable transactions.
Overview
Technologies
