Thirdly, we have a proprietary database of dealer bank rep codes that is shared amongst our client base. Our clients essentially benefit from each other's participation through the aggregation of all of the codes that their business is associated with. Vast databases of codes used to only be the province of large managers with very wide channels of distribution. Now, as a result of our approach to managing the data, managers can enjoy those same benefits through aggregation.

Finally, it’s always worth mentioning that our technology is 100 percent scalable, regardless of the size of the organization, as we feature best-in-breed data infrastructure. Our unbundled pricing model ensures that managers only pay for what they use, as they grow, which we feel is a huge benefit to all sizes and shapes of asset managers.

Hortz: What are the right questions to ask about contact management and sales reporting systems?

Franey: Incidentally, I wrote a blog post about this a few years ago and this is still an ongoing question even a few years later. We're about to kick off an initiative in terms of helping asset managers have these conversations because there's a lot misinformation or misconceptions in the approach that managers are taking in terms of evaluating and purchasing pieces of technology.

But, succinctly, the most critical points to ask about in the decision making process are: accuracy and timeliness of flow and asset data, efficiency and scalability, having a robust data mart and reporting options, integration to CRM, extensive product support and resources, bench strength and expertise of team, and flexible pricing arrangements. I would definitely encourage your readers to go read my blog post, which goes into a lot more depth than we can go into here.

Hortz: What best advice can you offer asset managers and other distribution organizations about choosing and applying tech solutions into their growth and engagement goals?

Franey:  My first piece of advice is to have a holistic strategy. Don't just buy technology in an ad hoc fashion or because someone told you to. There's too much at stake to take sort of a casual approach to this, this needs to be born of a strategy that we see most successfully implemented when it's coming from the C suite.

My second piece of advice is communicate with the firm's various stakeholders about the investments that you're making to the technology because in order to get buy in, there needs to be an effective approach to communicating to the stakeholder why you're doing what you're doing. Communicating will drive buy in and then buy in will drive adoption and adoption will drive success. If you don't adopt technology you're just wasting your money

My final point is that there is some amount of rewiring of the corporate mindset that's necessary because these well worn business processes of how your firm has traditionally done business will necessarily be shaken up as a result of the purchasing of this new technology

So have a strategy, communicate that strategy to the stakeholders and then learn and adapt to the new technology in place.