[Technology is a vitally important tool, but one must be careful not to use it as the proverbial “hammer” where everything else around it is a nail. Unnecessary or non-strategic application of technology can become a trap—a time, money and resources drain. How do we then determine the most efficient use of technology to solve a problem? What amount of technology is “just right”?
The Institute for Innovation Development decided to explore these questions with Matt Franey, director of business development at Celera Systems—an innovative information technology solutions provider and developer of SalesStation, a highly sophisticated data aggregation and data repository platform for the asset management and insurance industry. They grapple with these questions everyday in applying their technology to build out contact management, sales automation and activity tracking systems to support their clients’ sales efforts. This is an important topic to explore because getting it just right can transform corporate data into tactical weaponry for executing on strategy.]
Bill Hortz: How do you see your role as an innovator in information technology solutions?
Matt Franey: To make the right business decisions and deeply understand the interactions of investors and advisors with your firm, you need data. The data your firm is already generating, or has access to, needs to be analyzed and converted into strategies. So, I really view our role as two-fold.
First, it’s generating clean data. We have essentially what you could think of as a manufacturing process where we're going out to what amounts to dozens of different sources of raw data, which we then clean, and centralize and distribute.
Secondly, is our role of providing tools and guidance to our asset manager clients in terms of how to generate actionable insights from that data. An important point to make is that, as the industry has been evolving, now operating in a more model portfolio business where there's essentially an account structure that sits between managers and their end point investors or selling advisors, asset managers are becoming more and more steps removed from that important information. That's a very challenging business environment in which to operate. How are you supposed to make sure that you're staying relevant to your end investors and selling advisors? What strategic decisions should you be making?
And so, that is really the paradigm or the challenge that we are seeking to meet. Just getting to clean data, and getting a clearer understanding of who are those end point individual and advisor clients, has traditionally been the challenge that our clients have focused on. I like to say that we, as a technology industry, have been known as basically “sales reporting.” Although, I'd contend that that's sort of an incomplete answer or imperfect term for what we do because really since our true value is in being managers of and consultants on data.
Hortz: How do you balance robust technology into a cost/time efficient solution? How much technology is the right balance?
Franey: I love this question because once upon a time, there was a dearth of options. Now there's almost an embarrassment of riches in terms of the technology solutions available to asset managers. And so, what I advise asset managers to do, who might be a little bit, let's say, overwhelmed or inundated with potential different tech solutions, is to constantly make sure that they're working backwards from the business objectives that they're trying to solve. So this is really going to look different from firm to firm in terms of the balancing act because different organizations have different business problems that they're trying to solve.
Working backwards from the business problem helps you arrive at a technology prescription that will be essentially a portfolio or tech stack approach of different pieces of technology that will solve that particular business problem. One specific solution versus another probably won't be the end-all-be-all. It's really a portfolio approach in a lot of cases to making sure that they're adopting the right technology.