The Institute for Innovation Development recently talked with David Halligan, director of sales and account management of SalesFocus Solutions—a FinTech company that focuses on sales analytics and reporting solutions for asset management firms. Their MARS Product Suite was designed to transform data from asset managers into actionable business insights to identify new sales opportunities, obtain product-targeted marketing leads and facilitate asset growth. We asked David to share with us his thoughts on the FinTech–Asset Management working relationship and how it can become a long-term strategic partnership.
Bill Hortz: How is your perspective as a FinTech company and as technologists helpful in addressing financial service industry problems?
David Halligan: Financial service and asset management firms have grown from internal legacy technologies to trying to manage and upgrade their various business technologies through their own IT group. The issue this presents is that they have an IT infrastructure that has grown into supporting business solutions for which they do not have the cutting-edge expertise they may need.
These firms need to leverage their resources by actively working with FinTech experts to creatively apply the newest IT solutions available or design new technology solutions for their business. Having an outside perspective on their business challenges combined with cutting-edge technology expertise, FinTech companies can help isolate the key problems to focus on, create new tech solutions to address them, and provide ongoing expertise and partnership to continually develop those solutions, as well as create others as the business evolves. This makes us a great potential partner to propel ongoing growth and efficiency for asset management companies.
Hortz: What do you see as a major problem for asset managers that could be solved by financial technology solutions?
Halligan: “Big data” has been a common catch phrase and buzzword for several years, but big data is not a solution. The ability to manage and draw direct insights from the growing amount of data asset management firms have, and using it to their benefit, is the solution. Turning big data into actionable intelligence is one the biggest challenges facing asset management firms today—especially when they try to accomplish this with only internal resources and legacy systems.
Hortz: Tell us about some of the proprietary software and other technology tools/services you have developed for your clients.
Halligan: Almost 20 years ago, we developed an asset management specific CRM that brought in sales and asset data from a handful of sources. Today, that system, referred to as MARS (marketing and reporting sales) has evolved into a distribution intelligence platform. It has evolved to accommodate sales and asset files for all asset management products as well as integrate with third party data sources such as Market Share data packs. Ten years ago, we added a data stewardship service because we realized there were economies of scale and it would be less expensive and more efficient for our clients to leverage our team of experts for this service. Today, that added service is standard for all clients.
Along with the MARS platform, we offer a proprietary mobile app built for iOS devices. This is typically used by the external sales team providing them with timely and accurate sales distribution and CRM related data. We have clients that continue using our CRM, but we also offer integrations with other CRMs such as Salesforce.com and MS Dynamics.
Leveraging our expertise, often times we can reduce costs for our clients by eliminating the need to hire expensive consultants or integrators since we can do this work for them. Most recently, we have launched a registered rep database of over 750,000 CRDs that is maintained by our data stewardship group and provides real time updates for our clients while managing changes across firms, offices and advisors in their MARS environment. We have enhanced the MARS platform and built our own analytics and visualization suite so our clients need not hire a third party vendor for business intelligence.