As a year-old startup, Clearsight Wealth Management in Toronto keeps a close eye on its budget. The company, which has focused on affinity marketing to Canadian university alumni, wanted to use Microsoft-based CRM for its marketing campaigns and sales follow up.

“A lot of bankers have told us that with informal contact management systems, turnover often results in the loss of valuable customer data,” – John Fraissinet, CEO of GaleForce

“We knew we wanted that solution from Microsoft even before we had identified a supplier,” said David Finley, president and CEO of Clearsight. “We knew that Microsoft would continue to invest in the development of its CRM product.”

Clearsight turned to GaleForce, another Canadian startup, based in Vancouver. GaleForce has taken the Microsoft CRM product, changed the screens to make it more applicable for the financial services industry, and added some new modules, such as a calling plan for high-value clients and a relationship tree to show the links between clients.

That fits the needs of Clearsight. “The GaleForce application is specific to financial services,” said Finley.

With the number of small and medium size companies in financial services, the Microsoft CRM application embedded in GaleForce should have a large potential market.

“The financial services industry has experienced a lot of change in customer expectations, especially since the economic turmoil of 2000,” explained John Fraissinet, CEO of GaleForce. Now many high net worth customers are looking for professional investment advice, a marked change from the do-it-yourself approach that was so heavily promoted by online brokers in the boom years. That’s when many investors made the old mistake of confusing a bull market with personal investment acumen. Now GaleForce is finding opportunities in wealth management, investment banking, and in brokerage and mortgage banking.

“Customer loyalty has been very, very difficult for financial institutions to get their heads around,” added Fraissinet. “By taking CRM to a new level, they can focus on customer acquisition, customer retention, and it also gives them the ability to maintain control over their corporate knowledge. A lot of bankers have told us that with informal contact management systems, turnover often results in the loss of valuable customer data. MS CRM allows them to keep that information centrally.”

The GaleForce solution works from Microsoft Outlook, so users can pick it up quickly, said Finley.

“It’s Outlook on steroids. Everyone has become comfortable with it quickly,” he said.

The focus market for GaleForce is mid-tier banks in the US, with assets of $500 million to $60 billion, said Fraissinet. Although installing a CRM solution within a department risks aggravating the silos of information that bankers are trying to overcome, GaleForce points approvingly to a TowerGroup report saying that the average mid-tier bank has opportunities for several CRM installations. An executive vice president at a department such as commercial lending or wealth management usually has the authority to install his own CRM system without waiting for the bank as a whole to make a decision.

Fraissinet figures GaleForce’s specialized solution can easily beat the prices charged to take a horizontal CRM application, such as Siebel, and tune it for finance.

“They are very expensive, and the ratio of expenditure on services, customization, and support to the license is very high. So if a bank spends $1,000 on a Siebel license, it will likely spend another $5,000 for support to implement it. Our system runs in Microsoft Outlook, and that reduces training time. It has great integration to back-office systems because Microsoft provides a framework for data and application integration. Most IT departments see this as a big added benefit,” he said.

The company often works with local systems integrators who can tie its application to Bisys, Metavante or other service bureaus and back-office systems.

At Clearsight, GaleForce has been a hit.

“We have had a great experience with them,” said Finley. “We are marketing to six million grads across the country. Since sales typically lag three to six months behind marketing campaigns, this fall and winter will be our first true season of activity, but so far we are hitting all of our numbers.”

www.galeforcesolutions.com

Back to Branch Basics

“Back when I was in the banking world, I would have killed for the kind of information that GaleForce provides,” said Warren Lewis, managing director, banking industry at Microsoft. “They took our core Microsoft CRM application and made it meaningful for the banking industry, and they did a heck of a job.” Placing CRM in a broader context, Lewis described it as the last key big piece in the puzzle of multi-channel integration. “Our primary battlefront continues to be a branch environment, but not exclusively the branch. Integrating the channels is required to provide a very positive customer experience and a very positive employee experience. Employees, after all, need information about their customers to do a really good job taking care of them. You need good information even for the Internet and the voice response unit (VRU). The branch is where the big spending is forecast, and we see a key part of this as a resurgence of what has been called CRM.” Failed projects have soured bankers on the term CRM, he added, even while surveys show they want what CRM promises – delivery of the right information to the right people at the right time. “Unfortunately, horizontal CRM vendors weren’t doing a very good job in banking because finance is so complex. GaleForce has combined CRM functionality with a user interface and the tools most applicable to the banking industry,” Lewis said.