5 Things Not Working with Today’s Wealth Management CRM

There are a lot of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions out there, including many by large and well-known companies, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to find a solution that works for wealth management firms and the advisors working with them. In our experience, the opposite is true – when we talk with potential clients who are interested in the NexJ Integrated Advisor Desktop (IAD), what we hear is a lot about what doesn’t work for them.

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IBM and NexJ: A winning combination for firms like yours

At NexJ, we have always believed that wealth management firms need wealth management-specific client engagement tools.  More and more vendors have seen the light and are now providing vertical solutions, including IBM who released the IBM Cloud for Financial Services in 2021.  Not only has IBM validated our strategic objective for financial services solutions but they have also validated that our products meet the rigorous compliance and security requirements of the financial services industry.
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Wealth Management Priorities Discussed in New York

Having our finger on the pulse of the wealth management industry allows us to develop solutions that address the challenges firms, like yours, face. To that end, hearing from folks at firms like Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, BNY Mellon and Raymond James among many others at the Aite Wealth and Asset Management Forum on November 9th provided valuable insights on the current challenges they face.

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Practical AI for Improved Client Engagement

The acronym AI needs almost no explanation. Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly prevalent in our daily activities, and it's safe to say we interact with AI several times a day without knowing it.
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Five Ways to Boost Your Advisor Productivity

Until advisors can clone themselves, the only path to growth for them – and the firms for which they work – is to get more done in the same amount of time. Technology is part of the answer, but how that technology is applied is even more important.

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Wealth Management Features in a Wealth Management Cloud

Cloud computing offers many benefits such as reducing the operational burden of running and maintaining hardware and software, shifting costs from capital expenditures to operating expenditures and enabling your team to focus on innovation. But are your cloud initiatives benefitting from the advantages of a cloud built for financial services?
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How an integrated advisor desktop transforms client lifecycle management (CLM)

How do we define CLM?

Client lifecycle management can mean different things to different people. For instance, there is often a tendency to focus on onboarding as the starting point or that servicing an individual as a client is the goal. The reality, from our perspective, is that CLM is everything from first contact with a potential client, through prospecting, onboarding, servicing and offboarding (although hopefully not the last step if you’ve got it right!). Acquiring a name and phone number to initiate a process that will result in the successful onboarding of new clients leads directly to the mandatory practice of meeting compliance requirements such as KYC reviews and loyalty programs that ensure clients are delighted with their experience and hopefully allow you to gain a greater share of wallet.  

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Get to Know NexJ’s Andrew Cant, Vice President of Financial Services Solutions

In the latest in our series of NexJ employee profiles, we are pleased to introduce Andrew Cant, Vice President for Financial Services Solutions. Below, Andrew shares some insights into his role leading R&D efforts and fostering a culture of innovation, what gets him excited about the future of integrated advisor desktops, and his passion for protecting our coastlines from coastal erosion.

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The Problem with Orion’s Integration Strategy

In our recent blog article on Orion’s acquisition of Redtail, we called out some potential issues with the “most-in-one” technology suite that the combined firm claims to be pursuing, and the limitations that could place on advisors and wealth management firms. Wealthmanagement.com has also published an article about Orion’s acquisition strategy, highlighting its shift from acquisitions to the integration of the platforms it has acquired over the past several years.

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8 Reasons Why Wealth Managers Should Choose a Vertical Cloud

In recent years, software has predominantly been made available as a service on the “cloud”. Unfortunately, the cloud infrastructure to date has been “horizontal” or not reflective of the unique infrastructure requirements of a specific industry. We are at an inflection point, however, where this is changing and vertical clouds are being made available. As a result you should be asking yourself, do you choose a “horizontal” cloud that is built for a wide variety of industries or a “vertical” cloud that is designed for your specific industry?

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Get to Know NexJ’s Jelena Duma: Sr. Director of Enterprise Architecture

At NexJ, we are enormously proud of the talent and dedication of our 100+ employees. They are the heart of NexJ and our most valued asset. We are pleased to introduce Jelena Duma, Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture. Below, Jelena shares a bit about her role at NexJ, why she’s excited about the future, and how playing drums in a rock band is the ideal way to relax after a hard day’s work:

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Client Focused Reforms and the Impacts on Your Firm

With the implementation of the final half of the CSA's Client-Focused Reforms on December 31, 2021, the wealth advisory industry has had to shift dramatically to adapt. Many requirements further constrain agents' time that could be used to build their books of business. Your advisors now need access to and provide much more information about investment products. "Know your product" and "know your client" require strict adherence from advisors to protect their careers and the interests and earnings of your firm.
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Dial Up Client Engagement to Succeed in Volatile Markets

It’s easy to imagine yourself to be quite the sailor when the sun is shining and the sea is calm – but when a storm blows in, many people who thought they could handle their own ship will decide maybe hiring a captain isn’t such a bad idea.
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Client Loyalty Programs Make Average Advisors Great

Client Loyalty is key to growing your business.  Loyal clients will let you manage more of their assets, and will refer both friends and family. Having the benefit of collaborating with some of the top financial advisors in the world, we found 3 common principles for how advisors increase client loyalty. Loyalty is driven by personalized engagement.
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Orion’s Acquisition of Redtail: Key Takeaways for Wealth Management Firms and Their Advisors

In June of 2022, Orion Advisor Solutions, a provider of wealthtech products, completed its acquisition of Redtail Technology, a web-based client relationship management (CRM) software firm, touting that the union would provide wealth management firms and their advisors with a “most-in-one” technology suite.

At first blush, this might seem a welcome solution for wealth management firms hungry for a fully integrated CRM solution. However, that “most-in-one” approach could very well be the Achille’s heal for the combined Orion / Redtail entity.

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What the Latest Research Report on Salesforce Tells Us About Financial CRM

Bigger isn’t always better – that’s the key takeaway from the latest research report from Nucleus Research on Salesforce’s CRM offering. In fact, as Salesforce has grown larger by acquiring and absorbing smaller competitors and specific products, the organization has seen declining scores in many areas – enough to push Salesforce out of its spot in the Leader quadrant of the Nucleus CRM Value Matrix. Shockingly, 51% of those surveyed said they would replace Salesforce if they could.

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Do Your Digital Transformation Initiatives Build Trust?

Gartner has published a paper on the need for chief information officers (CIOs) to build stakeholder confidence. It focused on strategies required to develop trust, without which the success of an enterprise’s digital business transformation inevitably falls short.

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What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence in Wealth Management: What Advisors Can Expect

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be everywhere these days, including (if they are lucky) at the fingertips of financial advisors. AI, when designed specifically for wealth management, can help advisors be more efficient, focus less on administrative tasks and more on actual client engagement. And AI continues to evolve and mature. In the next few years, advisors can expect AI to deliver even more highly intuitive, time-saving features that will free them to concentrate on what matters most in serving clients.

We recently caught up with Andrew Cant, Vice President of Financial Services Solutions for NexJ, to explore what’s next for AI in wealth management and what advisors can expect and look forward to:  

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How Can Your Advisors Gain 2 More Hours per Week?

Improving advisor productivity is always top of mind in the wealth management industry. It’s a logical focus for wealth management firms looking to attract and retain top talent and increase assets under management. Advisors that have more time to work on growing their book of business, are more likely to be satisfied and they’re bound to be more profitable. According to BCG, “The costs that affluent-focused players incur in producing business are far too high, and they could become even more profitable if they were to increase efficiency.” They go on to state that top performers need 5 fewer assistants than average performers showing the link between efficiency and assets under management.

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Smart Wealth Managers Service Households, Not Individuals. Here’s How We Help

Wealth management is about trust. It is about giving an advisor control of your financial health and security and depending upon that advisor to make or recommend decisions that help you meet your financial goals. When we, as vendors, focus on features that give our products an edge, we always focus on how specific features can help advisors build more trust. This is what makes relationship hierarchies so important.

In terms of technology, there are minor differences between relationship hierarchies for corporate and investment banking and wealth management. The big differentiator is the intent. Corporate and investment banks track multiple hierarchies for the same corporations, such as risk relationships versus legal relationships. This allows bankers to get a holistic view of what makes the most business sense for a client. Wealth management needs a single hierarchy because they focus on single households and extended households. So, how exactly do you make a hierarchy that specifically speaks to the needs of an advisor?

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Efficient Management of the Financial Customer Lifecycle

The life of a financial advisor is a constant juggling act – and one where the balls in the air aren’t all of the same size, shape and weight. To be successful, an advisor needs to keep track of prospects, make new clients feel welcome and reassured, help existing clients navigate legal and regulatory hurdles, and help clients who are moving on to a new phase in life enjoy a seamless transition.

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Everyone Guarantees a Productivity Boost. The Question Is, Can They Deliver?

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many front-office system upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity improvements. So, how do you sort out the empty promises from the legitimate ones? The simple answer: do your research. Ask questions, and demand proof.

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Forrester Research Report Highlights the Benefits of Industry-Specific CRM Solutions for Financial Services Firms

In a business landscape awash with “agnostic,” or non-industry-specific customer relationship management (CRM) tools, firms who adopt industry-specific CRM solutions are better able to unlock revenue opportunities, decrease risk, ensure compliance, and boost user adoption.

That is according to a recent Forrester Research report, “How CRM Evolves to Support Industry Requirements.” The report, which analyzes the impact and potential of CRM tools across several industries, clearly makes the point that industry-specific CRM solutions are increasingly sought after. That is particularly the case among financial services firms.

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By the Numbers: Analytics and Reports Gives an Edge

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s an old adage in business, and like many it has its limits, but clear, comprehensive data and reporting truly is crucial for advisors and advisory firms looking to maximize their business.

The challenge is that this data might be locked away in multiple systems, or data from one place might be needed to calculate or give context to data in another. NexJ has solved this challenge with its Analytics and Reports, a key component of the Integrated Advisor Desktop solution we have deployed for major firms.

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For the Best Integrated Advisor Desktop, Start with a Wealth Management Specific Product

The Best Advisor Experience Starts With a Model

How many business leaders want to talk about technology when all that matters is understanding how it will drive growth, save money, improve operations or address a specific key metric? The answer is likely few to none. And it's a reasonable position to take, after all, why would anyone spend money if they don't believe there is a return on that investment regardless of how innovative the technology? Does understanding the mechanics of how a product works to drive ROI even matter? In most cases, the answer is no. There are times, however, when a technical approach is different enough that not appreciating it might lead to the wrong decision. We have written many blogs recently that address the business benefits of an Integrated Advisor Desktop, from the functional components including a client dashboard, advisor dashboard, customer engagement dashboard to application integration and data integration. What brings the whole thing together though, the engine that drives the value of the functional areas and even the integration, is the model.

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Data Integration: Deeper Client Understanding Leads to Better Customer Service

Wealth managers are constantly looking for ways to enable greater efficiency and productivity for their advisors.  Providing tools that automate workflows, increase capacity and advance collaboration helps advisors focus on what matters to grow assets under management and improve client satisfaction. Often these tools, such as portfolio management, financial planning or performance reporting for example, are "stand-alone" products which makes it difficult for the advisor to have the full context of their client in one place. An Integrated Advisor Desktop solves this problem. Last week we discussed how application or UI integration, when done properly, can dramatically improve the productivity of your advisors, but that isn't enough, you also need data integration.

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Integration is Key for Advisor Productivity

Most advisors need to juggle multiple applications, searching for the client or account each time, to properly service a single customer. Advisor productivity and client experience suffer as individual tasks take longer to perform and mistakes are made. Advisors need a consolidated view of their customers with embedded tools and not just links to other applications.

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Invested Users Are Pivotal To Maximizing User Adoption

Leverage your CRM investment with a sound user adoption strategy.

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How a Client-Centric Dashboard Helps Financial Advisors Personalize Service

Successful financial advisors have to live in two worlds: They need excellent strategic awareness of their entire book of business and macro-trends in the markets and industry, while at the same time maintaining personal relationships with each of their many clients and translating those macro-trends into meaningful action for unique individuals.

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Engage With the Right Clients at the Right Time … Every Time: Get To Know NexJ’s Engagement Dashboard

Timely and relevant client engagement has never been more important in the wealth management industry than it is today. The last couple of years have upended expectations for advisors and clients alike. The ability to engage in real-time, highly personalized interactions on topics hyper relevant to clients is now table stakes for advisors and the firms they work for.

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Everyone Promises Increased Productivity. The Question Is, Can They Deliver?

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many a financial firms’ upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity right from the onset. So, how do you sort out the fluff from the legitimate ones? 

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Personalized Content Drives Engagement. Here’s How We Help

More and more wealth management firms are beginning to recognize that the ability to understand a customer better, based upon an understanding of individual likes and dislikes, enables them to offer solutions tailor-made for specific needs. This leads to product differentiation, deeper client engagement and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

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An Out-Of-Date CRM Is Hurting Your Firm in More Ways Than You Can Imagine

In the anatomy of a financial services organization, software is the circulatory system. It picks up the data in the brain, or database, and delivers it to where it's needed. It connects all the parts of the body together and ensures the body is working well as a single entity.  
 
So, when a system stops receiving support, it affects the health of the entire company. It can become expensive to maintain, difficult to upgrade, or so obsolete it risks pulling the company behind the competition. When people can’t or aren’t using the system, or when the system isn’t able to provide the functionality that’s needed, the organization must replace it. 

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The Dashboard for Everything a Financial Advisor Does: A Closer Look at NexJ’s Advisor Dashboard

Financial advisors are inundated with data. It can be frustrating and time consuming to say the least. Worse, having to navigate so many streams of information leaves precious little time for actual client engagement. Thankfully, there is an integrated, intuitive solution that harnesses all of the data points and next best actions an advisor needs and presents it all in one seamless dashboard.

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How AI Improves the Client/Advisors Relationship

From an advisor’s point of view, not all investors are created equal – in addition to the obvious differences in assets, age, employment and lifestyle, different people have different levels of receptivity to the advice and assistance an advisor can provide. At the same time, an investor’s position is not fixed: It changes with time and in response to outside influences. So how can an advisor best tailor the experience they provide to each unique and evolving individual, multiplied by the size of the advisor’s book?

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NexJ CRM for Wealth Management: Highlights

Looking for a CRM to meet your needs, but struggling to identify what features your advisors will actually use? Learn what a CRM truly made for wealth management means. Boost your advisors productivity by giving them the ability to view households and spheres of influence, the chance to engage them with personalized content and ultimately engage them at the right time with next best actions.  

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NexJ’s Integrated Advisor Desktop Is Key to RBC's Success

Recently, Investment Executive (IE) released their 2020 Brokerage Report Card in which RBC had the highest net promoter score of all the large bank-owned investment firms.  IE creates the report card by surveying advisors from each firm.  Why did RBC score so well? Because they provide the best tools to help advisors focus on client engagement and deal with rapidly changing regulations. In 2020, RBC scored the highest in the "Technology tools & advisors desktop" category.  They also scored highest for support in dealing with changing regulations.

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How AI can Supercharge Your Client Engagement

Artificial Intelligence or “AI” may be a current buzzword, but as anyone in the tech industry knows, its been around in various forms for years. At NexJ, for years we’ve used various forms of AI to help industry-leading financial firms enhance the relationships their advisors have with customers.

But there is a transformation underway that makes it possible for AI in its many flavors to supercharge and transform client engagement in the financial industry. And it’s why NexJ today can offer some of our AI-powered capabilities as products that firms can essentially “wire” into their current platforms. We call these capabilities the Nudge-AI Suite.

But first, let’s back up a bit and define what we mean by AI.

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Microsoft AppSource Adds NexJ Inform Solution

To better equip financial advisors to interact real-time with their wealth management clients, Microsoft AppSource is now offering NexJ’s Inform solution. Inform, a product in NexJ's Nudge-AI Suite, enables financial advisors to engage with their clients using news and content highly personalized to the client’s specific interests. NexJ uses a sophisticated AI engine to match client interests to news from wealth management-specific premium news feeds, including 15,000 publicly available news streams such as the Harvard Business Review and Barron’s, as well as a firm’s own research.

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Why Advisors Think They Need CRM, But Actually Need an IAD

There are thousands of companies and products that market themselves as Customer Relationship Management solutions, ranging from industry behemoths to tiny niche products. Given the importance of relationships to financial advisors, it’s no surprise advisory and wealth management firms think they need a CRM system. But is that really what they need?

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Improving the Advisor Experience: A Conversation With the Rudin Group, Celent, and NexJ Systems

We were lucky enough to sit down with April Rudin, Founder and President of The Rudin Group, Aawad Aamir, Analyst with Celent, and Andrew Cant, VP of Financial Services Solutions at NexJ Systems, about what truly improves the advisor experience. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the future of advisor efficiency, the current state of next best action, and how firms can implement tools to help advisors be at the top of their game.

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7 Ways to Deepen the Advisor / Client Relationship in 2022

Needless to say, the pandemic has upended the advisor / client relationship like no other event in our lifetimes. How, where and why financial advisors engage with their clients looks very, very different than it did pre-COVID. From Zoom meetings to virtual events to AI-driven online dashboards, clients have become accustomed to a very different way of working with their advisors … and frankly expecting much more.

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How Integrated CRM Platforms Elevate Wealth Management Marketing

The wealth management industry has always been competitive. With the advent of robo-advisors, retail investor apps and financial firms of all stripes entering the fray, each promising potential clients more of what they want, how can an advisor stand above the crowd and attract the right kind of clients?

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What is an Integrated Advisor Desktop and Why You Need One

Think about the volume of data you have at your fingertips. Investment research. Macroeconomic reports. “Social signals” from your clients. Now, how well do you feel you are able to bring all that data together, real time, to the benefit of your clients? Daunting, isn’t it?

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Capturing ‘Money in Motion’: How AI Can Power Next Best Actions

“Money in motion.” It’s a phrase many advisors are familiar with. However, to capture that money is easier said than done.

Not only must advisors be clued into money in motion events, such as a client getting married (or divorced), having a child, inheriting money, selling a business, or changing careers or getting promoted, but they must be able to access that intelligence in real time with actionable ways to capitalize on the opportunities presented.

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Beyond the Buzzword: How ‘Enhanced Client Engagement’ Drives Advisor Success Today

Wealth managers have talked about “personalization” and “client-centricity” for years. But is that actually how clients feel about the service they receive, or does it sound to them like more marketing speak?

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Practical AI for Wealth Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) in wealth management is no longer a cutting-edge technology. Many firms now claim to leverage AI within their CRM systems. However, despite its broad adoption, the targeted application of AI toward very specific advisor needs remains a lofty, unrealized goal for too many wealth managers. In other words, AI needs to be practical and solve specific problems for it to drive efficiency and enhance the client experience.

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Meeting the Moment: Wealth Management CRM Market Overview

The wealth management industry has undergone a tremendous level of change in the past two years, driven by COVID-related forces, changing consumer expectations, and technological advances. The customer relationship management (CRM) market for wealth management is fighting to stay abreast of these trends and deliver the kinds of useful insights and time-saving efficiency advisors need to succeed. 

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True Wealth Management CRM Has These Things in Common  

CRM is a bit of a catch-all term these days. Originally, meant as a way of centralizing all of your relationship interactions with your client. As technology and the industry advanced so did the buzzwords and trends. Add the evolution of vertical industry-specific CRM and you have an umbrella of terms and features that obscures what a CRM, let alone a CRM built for Wealth Management is. So, what exactly makes a Wealth Management focused CRM? 

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Wealth Management Specific CRM Is Important. Why Aren’t Other Vendors Delivering?

In July, Celent awarded NexJ the highest Advanced Technology score among all the wealth management CRM platforms they evaluated for their 2021 report. This was not the first time NexJ has been acknowledged for its superior technology – Aite-Novarica Group also recently recognized NexJ as best in class.  We are grateful for this acknowledgment, which further explains why leading wealth mangers including UBS, Wells Fargo, and RBC selected NexJ to be the core of their advisor desktop.   

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Improve Engagement with Automated Personalized Content

Communication is key when it comes to building a relationship between wealth managers and clients, but how do you keep a consistent approach?

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CRM Is Key to True Hyper-Personalization

Customer expectations have changed across businesses and sectors, with customers now expecting the same kind of engagement from financial institutions that they do with other products or services. More and more wealth management firms are beginning to recognize that the ability to understand a customer better, based upon an understanding of individual likes and dislikes, enables them to offer solutions tailor-made for specific needs. This leads to product differentiation, deeper client engagement and, ultimately, customer loyalty.

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Successful Advisors Service the Household, Not the Individual. Here’s How We Help.

Wealth management is all about trust. It is about giving an advisor control of your financial health and security and depending upon that advisor to make or recommend decisions that help you meet your financial goals. When we, as CRM vendors, focus on features that give our products an edge, we always focus on how specific features can help advisors build more trust. This is what makes relationship hierarchies so important.

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Forget Happiness; Success Is the Key to Keeping Your Customers.

"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success." – Henry Ford

You’ll often hear the adage “You’re the team that has to make customers happy” when you’re a part of the customer experience department. While keeping happy customers is obviously a goal, this is not how we would describe the role of the department. A focus on an abstract sentiment like “happiness” deflects attention from the more crucial challenge for a Customer Success Manager – making sure customers stay customers.

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Leaders in the Field: NexJ Receives XCelent Award for Technology

To deliver optimal value to our customers, NexJ leverages our vast experience in deploying our software at the most recognized financial services firms in the world, our strict focus on addressing the specific business needs of the sub-vertical markets within financial services and our fervent passion for innovation. But as a vendor of technology in a very competitive market, we cannot rest on our laurels…

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Hyper-Personalization Is Key to a Firm’s Success. Here’s How We Make It an Effortless Experience.

Many firms claim they offer a “Netflix” like approach to their clients, but do they have the tools in place to create a seamlessly personalized experience?

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Scaling Down to Scale Up Using Kong’s API Gateway

At NexJ, the pioneer of intelligent customer management with client engagement products designed for the financial services industry, we sought to capture the full addressable market by breaking down the monolith and going API-first. At the core, many organizations choose to shift this direction for scalability and connectivity, but the value-add can be exponential. Here is a deeper dive into our implementation journey with Kong.

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NexJ Drives End-to-End Connectivity With Kong to Scale CRM Solutions

In a recent presentation at Destination: Scale, I gave an inside look into how NexJ, the pioneer of intelligent customer management with client engagement products designed for the financial services industry, expanded our customer base utilizing modern architecture focused on scalability and connectivity.

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At RBC, an Advisor's Success Starts with an Integrated Advisor Desktop

Recently, Investment Executive (IE) released their 2020 Brokerage Report Card in which RBC had the highest net promoter score of all the large bank-owned investment firms.  IE creates the report card by surveying advisors from each firm.  Why did RBC score so well? Because they provide the best tools to help advisors focus on client engagement and deal with rapidly changing regulations. In 2020, RBC scored the highest in the "Technology tools & advisors desktop" category.  They also scored highest for support in dealing with changing regulations.

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Invested Users Are The Key To Maximizing User Adoption: Part Three Of Our Series On Best Practices

How are you maximizing your CRM adoption initiatives?

In our last blog I discussed NexJ’s second set of three best practices for user adoption, and why Planning, Partnering, and Encouraging leadership are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM. Today, I’d like to discuss the last three of the 9 best practices for user adoption, which are Engaging, Offering, and Measuring.

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Invested Users Are The Key To Maximizing User Adoption: Part Two Of Our Series On Best Practices

A high adoption rate is critical to the success of any CRM initiative.

In our last post, I discussed NexJ’s first three best practices of user adoption, and why developing, analysing, and aligning are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM. Today, I’d like to discuss the next three of the 9 best practices for user adoption, which are Planning, Partnering, and Encouraging.

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NexJ Is The Only CRM On IBM Cloud For Financial Services. Here’s What That Means.

In 2019, NexJ chose the IBM Cloud to host its CRM and Nudge-AI products. Soon after, in July 2020, we became a founding partner on the IBM Cloud for Financial Services.

There are several reasons why this partnership makes for a strong value proposition, starting with the fact that financial services firms stand at the threshold of a post-pandemic world. They face challenges that can be better addressed by a vertical-specific product, coupled with a cloud offering designed to address requirements ranging from regulatory compliance and security to resiliency.

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Invested Users Are The Key To Maximizing User Adoption: Part One Of Our Series On Best Practices

Leverage your technology investment with a sound user adoption strategy.

It is possible to have extremely high quantitative results without having high user adoption because users can log into your CRM system without actually using it.

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Don’t use the same CRM they use for Hospitality! Use Financial Services CRM.

Amp your adoption rate with the right vertical-specific CRM

“Vertical CRM will be the preferred CRM Choice in the next three years”1

-Kate Leggett

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Here’s How The Client Onboarding Process Can Help Your Firm Turn Obligation Into Opportunity

What's your onboarding process?

Like every other interaction with business these days, customers expect client onboarding and new account opening to be fast, efficient, and easy. Traditionally, onboarding in financial services has been a paper-based process not known for its efficiency. We’ve all had an experience that went something like this: “I need to ask you some questions … Sorry, I need that information again to fill out another form … And another form … Now please sign here … and here … and here … Now, hang on while I get you a photocopy …”

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Using An Obsolete CRM Can Be Damaging To Your Firm In More Ways Than One

In the anatomy of a financial services organization, software is the circulatory system. It picks up the data in the brain, or database, and delivers it to where it's needed. It connects all the parts of the body together and ensures the body is working well as a single entity.

So, when a system stops receiving support or development, it affects the health of the entire company. It can become expensive to maintain, difficult to upgrade, or so obsolete it risks pulling the company behind the competition. When people can’t or aren’t using the system, or when the system isn’t able to provide the functionality that’s needed, the organization must replace it.

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How Your CRM Manages Relationship Hierarchy Can Define How Well You Know Your Customers

Don't capsize your client relationships with poor info!

Trying to tell corporate and investment bankers about the importance of understanding their customers is a lot like listing the benefits of butter to a pastry chef. They get it. They know it really, really well. And yet, considering we are in the business of Customer Relationship Management, I sometimes can’t help but question what this means.

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Wealth Management Advisors Should be Using CRM Designed for Wealth Management Advisors

Amp your adoption rate with the right vertical-specific CRM

 “Vertical CRM will be the preferred CRM Choice in the next three years”-Kate Leggett1

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Everyone Promises Increased Productivity. The Question Is, Can They Deliver?

Vendors Say The Darndest Things

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many front-office system upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity improvements. So, how do you sort out the empty promises from the legitimate ones? The simple answer: do your research. Ask questions, and demand proof.

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We Took On Some The World’s Biggest CRM Vendors. Guess What We Won?

It seemed like the perfect dare to end 2020 with: Take on some of the world's leading CRM and CX tech providers in a battle that had nothing to do with what we usually do best.

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Here’s Why Wealth Managers Have More Challenges To Deal With Than Ever Before

How secure are wealth managers today? This simple, yet interesting question, can yield different answers depending upon when it is asked.

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Personalized Content Helps Wealth Managers Drive Engagement. Here’s How We Make It Easier

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of communication when it comes to the relationship between wealth managers and clients.

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Here’s Why An Integrated Workstation Is More Important Than Ever

The definition of value has evolved over the past few months for financial services firms as well as their customers.

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CRM Can Address Challenges Faced By Advisors In A Post-Pandemic World. Here’s How

Advisors in financial services firms work with more and more data over time.

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Technical Communicators at NexJ Systems Foster A Symphony of Collaboration

Which five albums would you like to be stranded on a desert island with?

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Here’s Why A Proof Of Concept Can Increase The Chances Of Your Project’s Success

In a post-pandemic world that frowns upon unnecessary risk-taking, the question all firms should be asking is: Can an RFP ever be enough?

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Unusual Times Call For Solutions That Can Help Build Customer Trust

For those in Wealth Management, what has emerged is the acknowledgment that customer engagement is more critical than ever before. 

Advisors who understand their clients better, and then use this understanding to meet specific needs more effectively, are going to emerge from this unprecedented crisis in better shape than the rest.

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For Financial Services Firms Interested In Hyper-Personalization, CRM Is Always The Key

It is based upon the fact that customer expectations have changed across businesses and sectors, with customers now expecting the same kind of engagement from financial institutions that they do with other products or services.

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NexJ Adopts a ‘Safety First’ Approach to Dealing with COVID-19

Support

Our customers will continue to experience the same superior level of support they are accustomed to from our global support organization.

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Here’s How Leveraging Client Information Can Help You Become The Banker of Choice

Innovation and a global approach

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When It Comes To CRM, User Adoption Is Always A Challenge. Here's How One Of Our Biggest Clients Pulled It Off

You may have the best possible CRM solution on the market, a deep vertical award-winning software geared to meet your every need. What you will always struggle with is poor user adoption.

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How Important Is A Concierge Service In Private Banking? An interview with Andrew Cant, VP, Financial Services Solutions

We put forth a few questions to Andrew Cant, our VP, Financial Services Solutions, about what some institutions call Concierge Service, others Platinum

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Want To Make An Important Client Feel Special? Let Our CRM Elevate Your Concierge Service

The private banking industry uses all sorts of labels, from Concierge Service and Platinum Service to High-End, Superior, Luxury or Premium Service, to describe something very elemental: The need for customers to feel special. We get that. 

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We Believe That If You Want Customers To Stay Customers, You Need To Make Them Successful!

As the leader of a Customer Experience/Customer Success department, you get a lot of 'You're the guy who has to make sure that are customers happy’. While I like the idea of happy customers (Who doesn’t?), this is not how I would describe the

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20 Years After Its Formation, Salesforce Finally Wants To Understand Customers Better

Salesforce, for example, always manages to make us smile. Last year, the question posed by its co-CEO after his company acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion was: “…this is integration software, what does that have to do with CRM?”

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Here’s Why Our Early Access Program Can Feel Like Christmas Has Come Early This Year

I know the first question that pops into many people’s heads when they hear about programs such as these is: ‘Why not wait until we find out more before signing up?’ That’s a valid question but, when it involves a CRM product from an 

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Salesforce Customers Could Have Had A Better Week If They Had Picked A Private Cloud Solution

We saw the complaints online, read the messages on Twitter, checked out memes that circulated all weekend, and thought long and hard about the massive outage that affected a whole lot of Salesforce users. There were conflicting reports at first but, apparently, the deployment of a database script inadvertently gave users broader access than intended. This is a polite way of saying there were serious issues related to security that affected a lot of paying customers.

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If You Get Data Migration Wrong, How Will You Get Your CRM Right?

Data migration involves a change in storage and database or application, which is what makes it a potentially complicated process. This is why we, at NexJ Systems, adopt industry best practices while managing migrations from legacy systems, using our extensive tooling and significant experience with client data encompassing a varying degree of size and scope.

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Here Are A Few Things That Differentiate Machine Learning From Deep Learning

Take Machine Learning and Deep Learning, both of which make an appearance whenever a discussion of AI begins. What defines Machine Learning? How does it work? Isn't Deep Learning just another form of Machine Learning? We thought it made sense to try and simplify answers to those knotty questions. So, here goes.

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Here’s How Artificial Intelligence Helps Our CRM Get Smarter, Faster And More Powerful

Today, firms have access to information at an unprecedented level and must contend with a highly regulated industry as well as the commodification of products and services. For a CRM solution like NexJ, this represents a challenge as well as a great deal of opportunity, because more information about a customer is a powerful tool when used effectively.

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If Your CRM Is Smarter Than Ever Before, You Can Thank Artificial Intelligence

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed all kinds of industries and workplaces in a number of significant ways. Attitudes towards the use of AI have also shifted, along with the ways in which it has been approached. One of the biggest shifts has been the emphasis on top-down reasoning rather than bottom-up big data. 

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Client Onboarding: An Important Step in a Successful Journey

When users spend a great deal of time collecting onboarding data, the drain on a user’s time means they have less time to spend on revenue-generating activities. When data is housed solely in an onboarding solution, the information that can’t be shared between systems is lost for processes performed outside of the onboarding software.

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What, Where & How: A Glossary Of Terms Related To Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning

This is more true for the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning than others, which is why our developers have put together a list of more commonly used terms to help you tell your Algorithms from your Active Learning, and Selection Bias from Sentiment Analysis.

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Advantages of Single Tenant Cloud Deployment

Financial services organizations are accepting the advantages of cloud deployment because they are seeing that unified ecosystems, more agility, and better management of investments are all great for business. The cloud can be daunting though, for organizations that aren't clear about their priorities or don't have access to the expertise required to maintain or secure data effectively.

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If Your CRM Doesn't Take Integration Seriously, How Can It Offer Seamless Access To All Data?

Working with data is always tricky because there's so much that can go wrong so quickly. Any CRM solution that claims to do its job well has to deal not just with data duplication or conflicts, but with third-party applications, back-office systems that don't talk to each other, external systems and a seemingly unlimited number of integration points. 

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If You Want Your CRM To Fail, Just Make Integration An Afterthought

Here's an interesting piece of information that got lost in the hype surrounding Salesforce's biggest deal ever. Apparently, the acquisition of MuleSoft in March for $6.5 billion was met with skepticism by senior management, until they were gently informed by a financial services firm of the importance of connecting data that is stored in disparate systems.

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Not Getting Results? Stop Using Wealth Management CRM For Corporate And Commercial Banking.

 “Vertical CRM will be the preferred CRM Choice in the next three years”1

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Do You Really Know Your Customers Or Is Your CRM Showing You Just The Tip Of The Iceberg?

Trying to tell corporate and investment bankers about the importance of understanding their customers is a lot like listing the benefits of butter to a pastry chef. They get it. They know it really, really well. And yet, considering we are in the business of Customer Relationship Management, I sometimes can't help but question what this means.

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Smart Wealth Managers Service Households, Not Individuals. Here’s How Technology Helps

Wealth management is about trust. It is about giving an advisor control of your financial health and security and depending upon that advisor to make or recommend decisions that help you meet your financial goals. When we, as CRM vendors, focus on features that give our products an edge, we always focus on how specific features can help advisors build more trust. This is what makes relationship hierarchies so important.

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Don’t use the same CRM they use for Hospitality! Use Financial Services CRM

 “VerticalCRM will be the preferred CRM Choice in the next three years”1

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Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment: What’s The Difference?

What’s it all mean?

Continuous Integration lets lots of people work on one project at the same time, while merging their work together in a central place regularly. This maintains the most recent version, so everyone is checking in or out only the latest code.

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Vertical CRM: Because When Did One Size Ever Fit All?

Our CRM capabilities and features are targeted towards a specific set of users, job requirements, or departments within an organization.

How does NexJ do it?

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For The Record, Continuous Deployment Can Lead To Continuous Benefits!

It makes perfect sense here too, because a Continuous Delivery Pipeline is nothing but a set of steps that code changes must go through to make their way to production. This Pipeline has four elements — Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment, and Release on Demand.

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Financial Services Need To Take Compliance Seriously Because The Benefits Are Very Real

We empathize. Really, we do. We are an award-winning software company thanks to CRM products that help financial services organizations globally, which is why we empathize the minute ‘compliance’ is mentioned. 

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Next Best Action: Smarter, Faster, And Really, Really Good For Business

Picture this: You, an advisor at a financial services firm, are interacting with customers. You have at your disposal an enormous amount of information related to their likes and dislikes, along with a comprehensive overview of their finances. 

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Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment

The Financial Services industry is a fast-paced environment. With constantly changing and increasing compliance regulations, client expectations, and access to information, financial services organizations need access to the newest and best tools. 

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NexJ’s Dynamic, Flexible, and Centralized Security Model

The increasing popularity of internet banking and mobile access are paired with increasing regulation and scrutiny. This means both more possibility for issues and more consequences when issues arise. NexJ enables firms to manage and protect information with a robust, centralized security model.

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British Airways Just Learned A Lesson That Financial Institutions Figured Out A Long Time Ago

This is a question that increasingly occupies a lot of minds across industries. For financial service providers, it depends on not just how their customer data is stored and protected, but how it is processed and used on a day to day basis. 

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The Language Around Cloud (And Other Things That Drive Solution Architects Crazy)

I am often reminded of a specific parable whenever someone drops the words 'cloud', 'private cloud', 'hybrid cloud' or 'SaaS'. It's the one about the blind men and an elephant, who describe the animal based on which part of its anatomy they feel, then come to blows because they assume the others are being dishonest. 

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Are You Ready For Open Banking? Because You Really, Really Should Be

A lot of people have the misconception that getting banks to change is like pulling teeth. It's a misplaced analogy, first because banks really are more open to embracing emerging technologies than most people think, and second because the last time pulling teeth was painful was probably around 1846, when the first successful surgical procedure was performed with anesthesia.

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Invested Users: Best Practices of Maximizing User Adoption, Part 3

In my last blog [Invested Users: Best Practices of Maximizing User Adoption, Part 2], I discussed NexJ's second set of three best practices for user adoption, and why planning, partnering, and encouraging leadership are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM.

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Invested Users: Best Practices of Maximizing User Adoption, Part 2

In my last blog, I discussed NexJ's first three best practices of user adoption, and why developing, analyzing, and aligning are crucial steps in the process of engaging your users with your CRM. Today, I'd like to discuss the next three of the 9 best practices for user adoption, which are planning, partnering, and encouraging.

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Invested Users: Best Practices of Maximizing User Adoption

In a previous blog, I discussed how to measure your user adoption rates, and the effectiveness of comparing quantitative and qualitative results. Because users can log into your CRM system, without actually using it, it's possible to have extremely high quantitative results without having high user adoption.

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Next Best Decision Models

Some of you may be familiar with Next Best Action in the context of Sales & Marketing, where the consideration is which offer is most appropriate for which customer at a point in time. Extending Next Best Action to customer service seems a natural progression, considering the service representative is already engaged with the customer, and presuming the interaction went well, means extending the dialog with an appropriate offer. 

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Riding the Wave: Enterprise Computing in 2018

Enterprise computing is undergoing a revolution, but it’s not the first.  It has undergone a number of phases, or waves, throughout its history, each looking to introduce efficiencies in how we work. The first two waves of computing were centered on the back-office. 

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NexJ: Delivering Industry Leading CRM

To deliver optimal value to our customers, NexJ leverages our vast experience in deploying our software at the most recognized financial services firms in the world, our strict focus on addressing the specific business needs of the sub-vertical markets within financial services and our fervent passion for innovation.

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Improve Machine Learning Effectiveness with a Feature Catalogue

Analytics and machine learning are all about data.  The quality and quantity of your data plays a critical role in determining the effectiveness of the models.  But even with reams of the best data, if your process doesn’t use it properly, your results will be dubious.

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Martin Sykora on Data Management Radio-The Rise of Jupyter Notebooks!

http://dmradio.dataversity.net/julia-python-r-the-rise-of-jupyter-notebooks/

Click above to listen to Martin Sykora, on DM Radio. Martin joins the discussion at the ten-minute mark, and for the roundtable discussion at the 49-minute mark!

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The Great Wealth Transfer

In "The Great Wealth Transfer is Coming, Putting Advisers at Risk," an article in Investment News, they pointed out that 66% of heirs fire their parents' financial adviser after they receive an inheritance. Marketing Wiz's "The State of Independent Financial Marketing" whitepaper discusses how every day, $2 billion in assets move from Baby Boomers to Generation X and Generation Y heirs. Combining these two statistics paints a concerning picture for financial advisors. How can Wealth Management firms address the needs of these inheriting children, to prevent losing 66% of their asset base?

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Disruption in Motion: Chief Data & Analytics Officer Financial Conference 2018

The customer experience, now more than ever, is the bar we use to predict the health and growth potential of a business. Most major financial institutions are taking this to heart by adapting their services to deliver the “delightful” customer experience we’ve come to expect as consumers (think Amazon, Netflix, and Uber.) I was reminded of the sea change that is moving our industry towards intelligent customer management while at the Chief Data Analytics Officers (CDAO) event in Boston last month. I contributed to a panel discussion about the emergence of machine learning in financial services, where I was joined by industry peers with first-hand experience transforming their business with data-driven insights. The efforts of fellow panelists and thought leaders, like José Murillo of Banorte, were on full display. Our lively exchange made clear that the disruptive forces of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning are here to stay.

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Recapping CDAO: Examining the Transformation of Risk Management

Last week's CDAO presentation on Single-Family Data Governance & Management by Freddie Mac illustrated how traditional back office activities are aligning and impacting front office processes.  We continue our recap of lessons learned at CDAO with this week's focus on risk management. This April, we were delighted to attend as well as participate in the Financial Services-focused Chief Data & Analytics Officer conference in Boston.  This annual gathering brought together senior-level data practitioners in financial services to share their latest innovations, best practices, challenges and use cases.  The concept of monetizing or commercializing data assets is revolutionizing the Financial Services industry by using governed data strategies partnered with business initiatives to realize data-driven transformation benefits.

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Data Governance at CDAO Financial Services Conference Boston

This April, we were delighted to attend as well as participate in the Financial Services-focused Chief Data & Analytics Officer conference in Boston. This annual gathering brought together senior-level data practitioners in financial services to share their latest innovations, best practices, challenges and use cases.

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Experts in Our Field: NexJ Recognized as Leaders in Nucleus Research Value Matrix

Our hard work continues to get noticed as Nucleus Research, a global research and advisory firm, has once again recognized us as an Expert in their most recent CRM Value Matrix.

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AI in Financial Services: Work Faster, Better, and Smarter Today.

It’s interesting that artificial intelligence is such a hot topic these days because AI itself is not new. The concept of an ‘artificial brain’ was discussed by scientists in the 1930s. In 1950, Alan Turing created the Turing Test to distinguish machines from ‘thinking’ machines.

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Intelligent Customer Management – The Untapped Value of AI in Wealth Management.

It’s been astonishing to see the amount of media attention around Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent months. From the dystopia of HBO’s Westworld to the hype of Salesforce's Einstein, we’ve been inundated with larger than life claims about AI and its abilities. 

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Operationalize Business Results with Semantic Modelling

The flexibility and cost effectiveness of Apache Hadoop was quickly recognized by many organizations as an effective delivery vehicle to empower business users with operational self-service query and analytic capabilities.  Many organizations established, or are presently establishing, data lakes for operational intelligence query and analytics capabilities for the field personnel who need them most, best understand the data, and are the most capable of actioning insights gleaned. 

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Beyond Sales Force Automation

Clients choose NexJ because they are looking for a highly integrated solution as a strategic investment in their business. Their primary goals typically include improving the customer experience and driving cross-sell and upsell. To accomplish these goals, commercial and corporate banks are looking for an integrated banker experience that uses an enterprise view of the customer to drive cross-system workflows and enable bankers to collaborate across channels, regions, and lines of business. 

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Data Lake Query Quality

Many organizations established, or are presently establishing data lakes as a cost effective means of provisioning operational intelligence query and analytics capabilities directly to the field personnel who need them the most, understand the data the best, and are the most capable of actioning insights gleaned.  Sounds like an ideal arrangement.  

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Deciphering Vendor Speak, Part 3: ‘Increase Productivity’

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many front-office system upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity improvements. So how do you sort out the empty promises from the legitimate? 

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Thoughts from Digital Integration in Wealth Management 2018

Back for it’s 2nd year, the Digital Integration in Wealth Management conference took place last week in London, UK at the Chelsea Harbour Hotel. The two-day event, put on by the folks at Arena Financial, brought together industry thought leaders in Wealth Management.

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AI, Chatbots, and Intelligent Customer Management : Video Primers

Interested in AI, Intelligent Customer Management, or Chatbots, but having a hard time unpacking what they all mean? Adam Edmonds, VP of Products at NexJ Systems, explains everything you need to know in this series of short videos.
 

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Quantitative or Qualitative - What Are Your User Adoption Results?

High user adoption rates reflect that your company's software investments are being appropriately leveraged, and ideally show that users are engaging with the system. To determine the effectiveness of the software at your company, you need to know your user adoption rates.

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Querying the Data Lake

The Apache Open Source contributions to Hadoop are numerous and cover a broad portion of a reference architecture. It has been some time since we considered foundational low cost storage and in-place query capabilities. And as we saw in the "Data Lakes" blog posting, many organizations utilized this foundational offering.

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The Best CRM for Wealth Management

I admit it; though I’ve been marketing software companies for many years, when it comes to earning recognition from the industry, I still feel a great sense of achievement. So when Aite Group, a global research and advisory firm, recognized NexJ for being top in features and technology in their report Next-Era Wealth Management CRM: Technologies to Acquire and Engage, I was elated.

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Deciphering Vendor Speak, Part 2: ‘Improve the Customer Experience’

Vendors have a similar language when it comes to describing the benefits of their solutions but that doesn’t mean you’ll get the same results with every solution. Whether you’re looking for CRM, customer engagement, business process management, or a customer insights platform, it’s worth your while to ask each vendor how their solutions deliver on their promises.

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Intelligent Customer Management in Commercial and Corporate Banking

In my previous blog, we discussed how Intelligent Customer Management applies to Wealth Management and Private Banking. This blog will do the same but for Commercial and Corporate Banking. If you read my previous blog, you’ll find the description of the mechanics familiar, even though the examples are tailored to Business Banking. 

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Intelligent Customer Management in Wealth Management

The power of AI at scale

In my previous blog, I introduced the concept of Intelligent Customer Management that we discussed at NexJ Client Day. Many of our Wealth Management and Private Banking customers were eager to discuss how it could explicitly apply to them. 

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Deciphering Vendor Speak, Part 1: ‘Better Understand Customers’

Whether you’re shopping for customer relationship management, customer engagement, business process management, or a customer insights platform, you’re bound to come across similar vendor promises. “We’ll help you better understand customers. Improve the customer experience. Increase productivity.”

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Fintech Needs in Wealth Management

Today I’m boarding a plane heading to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.

It’s not my first time in the “City of Sin”, in fact I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been, but this trip is different. Tomorrow morning the Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit 2017 #GartnerAPPS begins. These shows are always incredibly insightful.

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Wealth 2.0: Robots, Hybrids, and AI, OH MY!

It was a pleasure to attend the inaugural Wealth 2.0 conference in Canary Wharf, London, UK last week. The two-day event brought together industry leaders from some of the top wealth management firms including Barclays, BNP Paribas, Schroeders, Northern Trust, Rabobank and many more as well as robos like Wealthsimple, Nutmeg and PensionBee. Of course, innovators like NexJ such as SwissQuant and Addativ were there too.

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NexJ CDAi at Neo4j GraphConnect New York 2017

This year, we were invited by Neo4j, one of our key development partners, to attend GraphConnect, their annual global gathering. This was the first year Neo4J held GraphConnect in New York, so NexJ was especially grateful to not only participate in this inaugural event, but to be one of the partner exhibitors as well. The gathering extended the reach of Neo4j, offering something for everyone, including developers, data scientists, big data architects, and business analysts looking to reveal new connections in their analysis.

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Intelligent Customer Management

In early November, we welcomed our clients to Toronto for NexJ Client Day. Clients got together to share ideas and discuss the future of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) within financial services. The theme of the day was Intelligent Customer Management.

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It’s All About the Customer

I know, I know… I’m always talking about how it’s the age of the customer and how everything revolves around the customer. Guess what? I don’t just talk about it, I live by it too. Last week, it was my privilege to host our 2017 Client Day here in Toronto. We were joined by senior business and IT leaders from many of our customers from across the globe, across the country, and down the street. 

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Omni-channel to Omni-digital: The New Normal

PwC's 2017 Digital Banking Consumer Survey summary, "(Don't) take it to the bank: What customers want in the digital age," proposes a new segment of consumers they've called "omni-digital." They define omni-digital customers as those who "don't use physical channels like branches or call centers to interact with their financial institutions." 

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Strengthen the Advisor-Customer Relationship with Meaningful Non-Financial Touches

I’ve spoken in the past about integrated desktops and the value they bring to advisors and the firm. In essence, the integrated desktop brings together all the information and applications an advisor uses into a single workspace.

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AI in CRM for Wealth Management: Sizzle or Steak?

I’m a consistent conference goer. I go to learn about and discuss all things wealthTech, and every year we see the bandwagon steer towards the same trends. This year especially – though certainly true of the last few years – we seem to have latched on to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). I see demos of some really cool technology. 

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Investing in Data Insights

In today's financial services and insurance markets, you have access to massive amounts of information from multiple sources about your customers. The Internet of Things has led to an exponential increase in data types and sources, and assembling that information into usable insights can provide powerful knowledge about your potential or existing customers. 

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AI & Your Competitive Edge in a Changing Marketplace

In our last post, we looked at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms that banks are using to drive their digital initiatives. Now, we come to the central question that banks are faced with: “We have a great brand. How do we grow revenue? And can we increase customer loyalty while doing it?”. 

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Discussing the Future of Wealth Management

This week, we had the privilege of hosting our Future of Wealth Management executive roundtable discussions here in Toronto, with a Canadian audience this time (see the insights from the one in NYC). It was a half-day event aimed at discussing the evolution of the advisor technology landscape, with a focus on customer engagement and relationship management. 

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Looking Around - Seeing The Benefits of Our Approach To Enterprise Development

Sometimes when you step back you can really appreciate things that may have become routine. I did this recently with our enterprise-first development approach. As usual, we are busy adding capabilities to our products that will make our client’s solutions even more valuable and I’ve been almost too close to it. 

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Will Your AI Strategy Deliver Revenue & Increase Share of Wallet?

As consumers, we use AI platforms every day. Google uses AI to auto-complete your searches. Amazon builds personalized product recommendations based on the things you’ve bought in the past. Did you enjoy House of Cards on Netflix? Give it a 4 star rating and AI will suggest similar content that you’re bound to enjoy.

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Digital Content Part III: Converting Social Posts

This is the third and final post in my series on Digital Content. In the first post, we discussed how your advisors can build a personalized professional brand using NexJ Digital Engagement and Artificial Intelligence. In the second post, we discussed using the same AI tools to deliver personalized touches to your existing clients.

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Why Banks are Using AI to Differentiate on Service

Today’s leading businesses have embraced technology to innovate and find an edge in our connected marketplace. It’s the Age of the Customer, and your customers have more options than ever before to access the financial services they need. 

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CRM Adoption Starts with Integration

For a person to use something, they almost always have to believe they have something to gain. For a CRM system, that means that a person should get more information out than they put in. After all, if all you have access to is the information you entered, what’s the point?

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) in CRM: It’s not Skynet. Yet.

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere all of a sudden. It’s on our phones, in our homes (I’m looking at you, Alexa) and peppered throughout our online experiences. It’s the hot topic from the water cooler to analysts to the media to the major industry players. (I think we all know where Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg stand on AI by now.)

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Digital Content Part II: Customer Engagement

In my previous blog, I discussed the importance of using content to create a personal brand on social media. To recap, NexJ Digital Engagement uses Artificial Intelligence to match articles from public news and internal sources to a profile that is unique to each financial advisor or banker. 

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Insights from In|Vest 2017

This year’s conference was jam-packed full of content. Billed as the event for following innovation in wealth management, this year’s incarnation did not fail to deliver on that. NexJ was among twenty 8-minute “Disrupt Demos” presented this year. It was a great way to get a lightning tour of the industry’s latest and greatest.

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Millennials Are The Future of Wealth Management. Are You Ready to Meet Their Needs?

The wealth management customer base is changing – both in behavior and age. Baby Boomers are shifting from growth to protection strategies or passing their wealth on to younger generations.

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Applied Analytics and Artificial Intelligence in Wealth Management

Will they run the markets and become our new overlords? Pushing science fiction aside, I think there are some key realistic expectations we can all start to consider as achievable with today’s technology.

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The New Advisor Desktop: it’s not just for desktops anymore

Let’s talk about your desk for a minute. Yes, that’s right. Your desk. That indispensable piece of furniture that provides a home to your computer, cup of coffee, print outs, pens, tchotchkes, and what have you.

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Sunsetting an Obsolete System

So when a system stops receiving support or development, it affects the health of the entire company. It can become expensive to maintain, difficult to upgrade, or so obsolete it risks pulling the company behind the competition. When people can't or aren't using the system, or when the system isn't able to provide the functionality that's needed, the organization must replace it.

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Digital Content Part I: Creating a Strong, Unique Personal Brand

Digital brands are important. In the digital age, customers do research on their financial decisions before they even contact the bank. They Google, talk to friends and colleagues on social networks, and look at the websites for both the institutions and the advisors themselves. When it comes to financial decisions, they are looking for someone they can trust and who will be a partner, not just a vendor. Your institution and your bankers themselves must communicate a unique perspective that makes them stand out from the crowd before the client reaches out directly.

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Key Takeaways from the CGI 2017 Connections Conference

This year, CGI’s conference was in beautiful Naples, Florida. The conference, focused on CGI’s North American Wealth Management and Global Banking solutions, brings together analysts, thought leaders, and also all of CGI’s wealth and banking customers.

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Hadoop Data Lake

In this blog series, we’ll explore the concepts that make up the Semantic Data Lake. We’ll begin with an introduction to Hadoop – what is it and why was it developed? Techniques traditionally applied when mastering complicated organizational reference data such as customers often require centralization to enforce standardization. 

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Beyond the Brochure - Why Project Success Begins with the Proof of Concept

You’ve seen the demo and read the brochure. You’ve read a dozen RFP responses, and expertly managed conflicting requirements and competing stakeholder expectations. You’ve short-listed the vendors, and authored a business case that you can be proud of. 

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AI and the Rise of the Bots

It’s still a little hard to get used to. For a number of years this would be the week I would make my way to the Big Apple, the financial services mecca of North America, to attend #CRMEvolution. The event used to take place in a hotel right in Times Square. There was always a flurry of activity all around.

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Choosing The Right Vendor: Don’t Limit Your Analysis to Functionality

At NexJ, we take great pride in being a responsive vendor. This is a big part of our value proposition – our desire to be a strategic partner who contributes to our clients’ success. If you’re making a software purchase, I strongly recommend you factor vendor responsiveness into the decision making process. It’s an invaluable intangible. So what exactly do I mean by ‘responsive vendor’?

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UK Regulatory Compliance Series – Automating to Prevent Financial Crime

In this, the second part of our UK Regulatory Compliance series, I’ll be focusing on requirements for preventing financial crime (also called Anti-Money Laundering or AML requirements.) Again, this is not a unique requirement for financial services firms in the U.K. – preventing financial crime is a pain felt all around the world. 

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Financial Services Innovation and Insights

It’s 3:45 a.m. and my alarm is screaming at me to wake up. I reach for my phone to stop the blasphemous racket. By instinct, I manage to shut it off but the noise keeps blaring. I realize that I had set the alarm on my tablet as well. Good thing too, because that's the alarm that brought me to my senses. As someone predisposed to staying up late rather than waking early, the hour is more familiar for being the end of a day than the start of one.

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Transforming a Contact Center into a Customer Engagement Center

In my recent blog, Customer-Centric Digital Transformation, I discussed the strategy for ensuring the customer is at the center of digital transformation. Today, I’d like to discuss one particular channel, the Contact Center. 

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The European Market Braces for New Regulations

The financial services industry in Europe is undergoing massive regulatory change of late, perhaps more so than anywhere in the world. They’re not alone in feeling regulatory pressure, of course. Firms around the globe have been dealing with the impact of the last decade’s economic recession and financial crises, in the form of complicated, overlapping, and ever-changing regulations.

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Chatting with Developers: Agile Development Practises

I'm not a developer. I don't work with code, and though I use computers every day, I don't understand what's running in the background. But that's okay, because I'm a writer instead. So I spend a lot of time asking developers about their process and trying to understand how they do what they do and why. Fortunately for me, they tend to be very patient people.

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Servicing the Client Across Their Journey

In any industry, like financial services, that relies on maintaining deep relationships with their clients, it’s critical to understand and service the client across their entire journey. Successful client experience solutions focus on features across what we call the “The Customer Lifecycle.” 

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Fintech Helps Advisors to Serve Clients’ Best Interests

For me, wealth management is more than just a target vertical that we serve at NexJ. It’s also my personal area of interest– not just from a fintech perspective, but also from a business and industry perspective. As part of that interest, I keep my own wealth advice training up-to-date with the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI). 

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CDM Enables Cost-Effective and Agile Data Mastering

Wikipedia defines Master Data Management as "the processes, governance, policies, standards and tools that consistently define and manage the critical data of an organization to provide a single point of reference".  Customer data is at the heart of every organization and is the most complicated data reference to master.

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Customer-Centric Digital Transformation

For some, it’s about reducing costs by modernizing the back office.  For others, it’s about leveraging disruptors within their enterprise.  For NexJ, it’s all about the customer.In the age of the customer, the customer is in control of their journey.  They dictate how and when they will interact with the firm.  

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Chatbots, Robotics and Business Process Management - oh my!

On October 10, 2014 at NexJ’s client day, Julie Ask (@JulieAsk), Forrester Research analyst and co-author of The Mobile Mind Shift, spoke to our customers about the behavior changes occurring as a result of the adoption of smartphones and apps. 

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Customer Exchange for Financial Services

Next week, I'll be flying to London, England, for the Customer Experience Exchange for Financial Services. The Exchange is a meeting of senior executives responsible for the design, development, and delivery of customer service strategies and solutions. Bringing together a range of exclusive experts from the Financial Services industry, this conference provides valuable information on current and future trends in customer experience.

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Integrating Advisor Desktops and Customer Portals

Even today, a key attraction for talented advisors (and more importantly their books of business) is offering a fully Integrated Advisor Desktop (IAD) platform. The big warehouses and the successful Investment Banking Divisions (IBD) know that integrating custodians/account management, portfolio management, order entry and management, financial planning, research, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are table-stakes these days. 

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Top 6 Things to Look For in Scheduling and Microsoft Exchange Synchronization

Today, we’re going to take a quick look at scheduling, a fundamental feature of a financial services CRM solution. It’s a necessity, however, many companies only give a few cursory questions about it in most RFPs we see. It’s a mistake to assume that all scheduling is alike. 

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Client Onboarding: Turn Obligation Into Opportunity

Like every other interaction with business these days, customers expect client onboarding and new account opening to be fast, efficient, and easy. Traditionally, onboarding in financial services has been a paper-based process not known for its efficiency. We’ve all had an experience that went something like this: “I need to ask you some questions … 

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Need to replace Siebel? Take an evolutionary approach

Siebel was a great product. At least it was when I worked there 10 years ago. But it hasn’t really kept up with the times. What began as an innovative solution to firms’ customer management problems has become outdated. New technology, interaction channels and complex regulatory requirements have changed the way that financial institutions need to operate.  What firms need today is modern and flexible technology to keep up with market changes, and CRM specialized for financial services as @kateleggett of Forrester and I discussed in an American Banker webinar last year.

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Toronto Tech 2017

Toronto, my home town, is a great city. The Economist has ranked it as the best city in the world to live in. I’ve lived elsewhere, other Canadian cities and in the USA, but I keep coming back. That said, it’s not often that Toronto plays host to a conference that I would attend.  In 2017, however, two such events have already been scheduled.

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A Prioritized, Evolutionary, Best-of- Breed Approach

As part of my job, I review a lot of articles about advisor desktops, platforms, and strategies. Rarely do I get to say that someone truly understands the reality of delivering and executing on them. I work with top wealth management firms regularly on their front-office solution road-maps and implementations, and I can tell you that it’s not easy. How do you cater for so much functionality in a usable but cost-effective way? Financial planning, CRM, portfolio and account management, order management, trade execution, statements and reporting, fee management, social media, etc. – it’s a lot. You cannot build all this in-house – you’re not a technology company, software is not your core competency, and it’s not economically viable to sustain. And as much as there will be a clamoring of vendors to tell you otherwise, the truth is that no “one vendor” can provide the right functional coverage to cater for all these needs.

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Customer Loyalty Analytics Part IV: Computing Lifetime Value

Last time we spoke about the importance of recognizing value immediately through agile implementation methods.  This time we are going to apply that to the domain of computing a lifetime value metric. So what is a customer lifetime value metric – without the algebra please! 

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