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

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

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.

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 

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 

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, 

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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? 

Back for it’s 2^nd 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.

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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." 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.