With Salesforce rolling out its Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, and Schwab discontinuing its One-View Integrated Office, which was anchored by Salesforce CRM, this seems like a particularly good time to revisit Junxure Cloud, a sophisticated, web-based CRM solution designed by advisors for advisors. Junxure was originally conceived by Greg Friedman and Ken Golding for use in Friedman’s own financial advisor practice. (He is the founder and CEO of Private Ocean, a California-based RIA firm).
When I last examined Junxure Cloud approximately two years ago, it was still in its infancy, and it faced a number of headwinds. The development and rollout took longer than expected, frustrating many potential purchasers. The application was designed from the ground up for the web, and this presented both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity was to design something specifically for the cloud, incorporating Junxure’s deep understanding of advisor needs. The challenge was in persuading existing users to learn a new, unfamiliar interface. Yet another headwind was that the initial version of Junxure Cloud lacked some of the capabilities of the original Junxure platform, functionality that some longtime Junxure clients deemed essential. Much has changed since I last reviewed Junxure Cloud, almost all of it positive.
Junxure Cloud Overview
Junxure Cloud is highly scalable. It can work well for a solo practitioner with one assistant, yet it is powerful enough to support large RIA firms with many employees. To get the most out of the application, an initial setup is required. First, you set up a user profile for each employee. This dictates, among other things, whether they show up on the list of advisors, what integrations they can access, and what alerts, if any, they receive. You also create a firm profile. Here, you can list multiple offices, administrators and firm preferences including document management providers, e-mail configurations and integrations. You can then create groups of users (e.g., administrators, advisors, etc.). Once you create groups, you can assign security features to each one. For example, you can dictate which groups can view a client’s record details, which can add an opportunity or perform an advanced search, etc. You can also impose user log-in rules and create custom fields during this process.
Once the setup is completed, users can log on to the system. When you log on, you land on the home page. This is your gateway to all of Junxure Cloud’s functionality. Here, there is an actions box that displays a count of overdue actions (if any) and pending ones. Click on pending actions and you will be taken to a list of all of them. This list can be sorted and filtered by numerous criteria such as action type, due date, etc. There’s also a link in the action box on the home screen to your last 20 actions.
The next box on the home screen, “opportunities,” works much the same way. There is a list of “open opportunities,” for the firm as a whole, and “my opportunities,” which relate to individual users. There’s also a link to the last 20 opportunities. Click on “open opportunities” and you will view a grid of all of them. All of the grids operate similarly. You can sort and filter them. If you’d like to add a column to the grid, you can select it from a column chooser list. When you’ve modified a grid to your liking, you can save it as a template. That way, the next time you want to use that view again, you simply select it from the list of templates. The template list offers two views: one with the templates that you’ve created, another with a list of templates that others in the enterprise have created that you have been granted access to. Those could be templates created by the administrator for firmwide use, or they could be ones another user has created that you can use too. All lists can be exported to Excel if necessary.
Records are where you store information on people or entities. You can create records for clients and prospects, but you can also create records for vendors and employees. Records store information about the people or entities, as well as interactions and tasks (“actions” in Junxure parlance). When you click on the records link, a list of all records appears. Like the other lists, this one can be filtered and sorted. You can also locate a record by using the record search box on the upper right side of the home page, or most other Junxure Cloud screens.
The records section of Junxure Cloud is one of the application’s many strengths. It is well organized, and it can store a great deal of information. The top portion of the client record page contains a summary, which can include names, addresses and contact information as well as pictures of the clients. It will also tell you the type of record (for example, a person), tell you who created the record and when, who owns the record and who can edit it. You can add a classification to the record (whether it’s a client or prospect, for example). You can also add tags to the record (for example: holiday cards, the required minimum distribution for client No. 1, the RMD for client No. 2, etc.). If you need more screen real estate to view the bottom section of the page, you can collapse the summary.
The lower half of the screen is divided into six sections that you can tab through. Each section has its own tabs. For example, the “profile” section has tabs for contact information, personal information (a Social Security number, passport information, driver’s license information) and more. There is also an extensive contact section that includes multiple address fields, phone fields, e-mail fields and even social media information. The engagement tab includes things like an investment policy statement date, a financial planning contract date, an investment management contract date, the date the client was referred, a risk questionnaire date, the investment objective, the risk tolerance, etc. Other tabs track employment, relationships, referrals, revenue and user fields. As you can see, the amount of information Junxure Cloud is capable of capturing is extensive, and this is only the profile section we’ve discussed so far. Other sections capture and track all tasks, documents, financials, opportunities and e-mails associated with a record.
Junxure Cloud’s actions, recurring actions and action sequences (work flows) are already well known, so we won’t spend much time discussing them other than to say the application’s capabilities in this area are both extensive and flexible. The actions list allows users to view all actions, mark them as completed, link items such as documents to them, add related actions to an action and more. The “add action” button can be programmed to display a list of preformatted actions or action sequences for repetitive tasks such as client services, moving money or quarterly report preparation.
The documents section is robust. You can store documents in Junxure Cloud or in a third-party system that integrates with Junxure such as Laserfiche. If you’ve created a folder structure for each client, that is displayed in the documents tab. For example, I might create for each client subfolders for accounts, correspondence, financial planning and taxes. I could then choose to display all documents, or just the ones in a subfolder. I can choose what descriptors I want to display in the grid (file names, types, tags, etc.) and sort or filter by any of them. To the left of each file listed are three command icons that allow me to edit, download or delete a document by clicking on the icon.
The “financials” section can track assets and liabilities, insurance policies, estate planning documents, income/expenses and taxes.
The “opportunities” section is pretty much what you’d expect. It is where you track opportunities to grow your business. The e-mail tab displays a list of all e-mail related to the record with identifiers including date, “to,” “from” and subject. Like all grids, this one can be sorted, filtered and searched.
The dashboard section, which can be reached from the home screen, has great potential. It contains a number of business analytics widgets that display information such as your top clients’ AUM as a percentage of overall AUM; accounts by investment model; top holdings; accounts by objective; managed/discretionary accounts; and overall firm AUM, which tracks your progress to your AUM goal for the year. In most cases, clicking on a widget drills down to a different view or provides additional details.
New And Noteworthy
One new addition to Junxure Cloud is the Client Service Monitor. It allows advisors to create tiers of service and define service models for each. You can set up deliverables periodically that ensure the service levels are met. It could be a phone call update, an in-person meeting, etc. Once set, the monitor automatically launches the work flows necessary to ensure that the services are delivered. There is an alert and reporting system that supports it. This functionality is essentially an enhanced replacement for what was called “deliverables” in a previous version of Junxure.
Junxure Cloud is also doing a good job of automating work flows. To cite just one example, if an alert comes from Schwab that a deposit over a specified dollar limit has been made, that alert can initiate an investment/rebalance work flow in Junxure Cloud.
Junxure Cloud comes with document templates, reporting capabilities and some work-flow templates. For those firms that don’t have the time or expertise to customize these things to their unique needs, Junxure offers consultants who can do the job for you and advise you on best practices for an additional fee.
The old Junxure client portal was somewhat antiquated. Junxure has now partnered with Modestspark to deliver a custom version of its client portal to Junxure Cloud users at a competitive price. I was unable to test it, but I was able to view it, and it looks great. Within Junxure Cloud, there is a “view client portal” button within the client record, so if your client has a question about anything regarding the portal, you can see what the client is seeing.
What We Like
Overall, Junxure Cloud is impressive. The depth and breadth of the information it can store out of the box is vast. In addition, user fields can be added to suit the needs of just about any advisory firm. The ability it gives advisors to build and automate work flows is impressive, as is Junxure’s extensive data management and reporting capabilities. Perhaps Junxure’s greatest advantage over large competitors such as the Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the Salesforce CRM is the company’s extensive knowledge of how independent RIAs operate their businesses, and its ability to tailor its product to meet that need. Yet another is Junxure’s well-deserved reputation for customer service.
A Few Challenges Remain
We’d readily recommend Junxure Cloud today, but there’s room for improvement. Because Junxure is so data-intensive and feature-rich, there is a learning curve. Online help is available. In addition, Junxure is touting its new “eXpert” help feature, accessible from anywhere in the application. My experience with it was mixed.
There is one challenge for Junxure Cloud users: How do you get all the information into the system if you are coming from another CRM application? You can import a good portion of it, but sometimes you are still faced with manual data entry. I hope Junxure and all vendors can automate more data flows in the future.
I loved the look and feel of the “My Dashboard” section, but it left me hungry for more. I’d like to see a much more extensive library of widgets here. I’d also like to be able to integrate widgets from integration partners here so that I can see all my widgets in one place.
Speaking of integrations, they are still a work in progress. Junxure Cloud currently has deep integration with Schwab. A similar deep integration with Orion is coming soon. Envestnet (not Tamarac) supports single sign-on. There are automated daily imports available from NetX360 and Morningstar. Most other daily imports are currently manual. More and deeper integrations are needed. One bright spot on the horizon: Junxure Cloud data will soon flow out to Black Diamond. I’d love to see more real-time, two-way integrations.
The pricing for the software is competitive. The list price is $65 per month, but there are numerous discount offers for $55 per user per month, and further discounts are available for larger volumes. The client portal costs $300 to $700 per month, depending on the size of your firm.
Is Junxure Cloud For You?
If your firm requires comprehensive, powerful CRM software for financial advisors, and if you are willing to devote the necessary resources to training your staff, Junxure Cloud is a fine application, as long as it integrates with your custodian and other key software providers. The application has improved considerably over the last year or two, and all indications are that more improvements are in the pipeline. A 60-day free trial is available here: http://www.junxure.com/products/junxure-cloud/free-trial.