A step outside of the world of insurance, wealth management and customer relationship management provides a textbook example of how multiple applications from different sectors of financial services need to work together to meet customer needs. A client looking for financial guidance should not have to run from bank to brokerage to insurance agency collecting information to create his own profile. Technology should be able to pull that information together from disparate sources, develop a comprehensive view of the client, and store the information so a financial advisor can access it through a CRM application.

Firms are just now beginning to realize how complex the issue of financial advice is for the larger market – the mass affluent.

According to Bill Hartnett, GM of strategy and solutions for Microsoft’s Financial Services Group, the graying of the baby boomers is the key driver in getting the financial services industry to look at all the information they need to provide useful financial advice. (The one exception to this trend is private banking, where these services have always been available to the very wealthy.)

“Wealth management is not just investments. My home is a significant source of my wealth, and [so is] my parents’ home. How I look at sending my children to college, and how I manage their entry into the wealth-building world that spans physical assets, real estate, investment products, plus my income potential from what I can earn in the marketplace – all these are covered in different parts of the wealth value chain. We have to look at it that way because that is how the end customer looks at it,” Hartnett said.

When Glass-Steagall’s separation of banking and investments was repealed with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) Act, expectations were that the industry would race to provide innovative and highly integrated financial packages for customers.

“Conventional wisdom was that only regulation was preventing all kinds of innovations in financial services,” said Hartnett. “What meaningful thing has happened since? Not one. The lesson we should learn is not that there wasn’t a need, but the technology was, and is, holding people back.”

According to Microsoft’s insurance industry manager Kevin Kelly, Microsoft IVC will simplify delivery of wealth management services.

“The prevention of a unified financial services marketplace, where more and more financial instruments are able to be summoned at the point-of-sale by a wider range of service professionals, is largely a technology problem,” he said. “For ages we were told that the US regulatory environment prevented financial service entities from competing and delivering next-generation financial services. As these regulations disappeared, the emergence of the unified financial marketplace failed to materialize, revealing that business aspirations remained thwarted by IT deliverables. The IVC is the ideal solution for rapidly deploying and extending new experiences and new products into point-of-sale and service that heretofore have not been enhanced by current technology.”

Separately, the new Office 12 product suite will also include several tools to support more comprehensive wealth management, including workflow and document management. And Microsoft CRM provides customer relationship management functionality that can be modified to meet the demands of a particular industry.