The financial services industry has experienced some severe market volatility in the past few years, and this unpredictability and instability has severely disrupted all aspects of asset management, from private equity and venture capital to real estate and REITs. 

Asset management organizations are taking a digital-first approach to stay competitive in this challenging market. They are benefiting from digital process automation (DPA) and other technologies to digitize and automate processes and transform how they do business.  

Here we take a closer look at the trends in the market, examine why they matter, and how asset management organizations can leverage digitization better to meet the expectations of their customers and employees. 

Building up tech in a bear market

An old adage says the bear market is the time to build. So, many asset management companies are taking advantage of this time to concentrate on their technology to be ready once the market turns positive.

Organizations want to be able to use technology to ingest market signals and use that information to develop a better understanding of their clients. They are:

• Using technological capabilities to scrape earnings reports and seek out new high-net-worth clients based on public records
• Using apps in the Salesforce ecosystem to get a heads up when a firm receives an influx of new money so they can be first in line to help manage that wealth
• Prioritizing productivity across systems, processes, and teams so they can close deals more quickly with automation

Another area of focus where Silverline is seeing asset management organizations scaling their business with technology is around their affiliate networks. They want to drive marketing for these affiliate brands and the funds that align with those brands. But asset managers need the data and intelligence that can only come from digitization to power these marketing operations successfully. That means moving away from legacy systems and shifting to modern tools like DPA.

DPA in action: Transforming retirement plan pricing and quoting

Silverline’s work with a retirement plan service provider exemplifies the themes we’ve covered around increasing productivity, improving the client experience, and besting the competition by using DPA in the pre-to-post sales process. This provider simplifies the administration of retirement plan assets for participants and serves the employer-sponsored retirement plan market across government, corporate, nonprofit, and private-label. 

The retirement plan service provider used a legacy, custom-built pricing system to provide its distribution clients (financial advisors and firms) with retirement services quoting. As the current system was more than a decade old, the company faced increasing challenges in supporting, updating, and evolving the system to meet current and anticipated business needs. 

The organization needed to transform its existing pricing system with one that was more robust and could evolve as the company scaled and would drive efficiencies across the sales cycle.

The retirement plan service provider chose Salesforce Industries (SFI) as the foundation for a new pricing system. This was the first instance of SFI being used in the Wealth and Asset Management space, so the client partnered with Silverline for guidance on the new solution’s strategy, design, and implementation.

The new pricing system built on SFI used OmniScript for guided retirement plan services flows while housing and executing all pricing rules automatically. The new system incorporated all complex business rules, pricing calculations, and quoting document generation in a user-centric design.  

Silverline’s solution incorporated another unique capability in SFI: A custom retirement fund selector that provided the company’s wholesalers a way to define, filter, compare, and select retirement funds from a comprehensive repository of funds. This solution allowed a streamlined process that incorporated seamlessly into pricing flows. It provided additional user efficiency improvements via external file uploads and the ability to save and modify favorite selections.

The provider has been experiencing notable results, including:

• Increased capacity and volume of retirement plan services quoted, including additional new product offerings incorporated upon launch
• Increased efficiency and speed of quoting via guided pricing UI, automation, and reduction/elimination of manual processes
• Systematized offering and pricing complexity with minimal customization and technical debt, plus the ability to maintain and support with minimal technical expertise

Drive continuous digital innovation with Silverline

Silverline tailors digital transformation solutions to meet your current and future needs with the foundational tools your advisors need to stay connected with clients, nurture relationships, and get robust insights from data. Using the power of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud paired with DPA, our team helps you maximize the time spent helping clients achieve their goals and close more deals. Find out how we can help your organization.