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What’s In A Risk Management Information System?

February 11, 2020 SAP

Part 5 in the “Controls and Risk Management“ series

I have been working in the governance, risk management, and compliance software arena for over 15 years now, and even though some consider it a mature market, I would argue that we are still at the beginning.

Yes, it’s true, many companies have adopted functionalities to help them automate parts of the process, but in most cases, integrated control and risk management solutions are still in early-adoption phases, and many still run them in silos … unfortunately, may I add!

To me, this is mostly due to two simple factors:

There is still not a great deal of collaboration between the different departments that are stakeholders in these processes. (Environment, health, and safety has its own solution, compliance as well, so does audit, etc.)

Companies don’t really know what they can expect from such tools and how the tools could support their processes. They select tools for their immediate need but don’t explore other business cases.

To discover more about the potential features and functionalities available, companies usually use three methods: subscribing to IT analyst research, contacting individual software providers, or talking with peers from professional organizations.

I’d like to talk about this third option and introduce the Risk Management Information Systems (RMIS) Panorama. The Panorama is created and made publicly available – free of charge and of registration – to all interested readers by the French Association for Corporate Risks and Insurance Management (AMRAE). Now in its 11th edition, it is published in French and English.

In a previous blog (GRC Tuesdays: The SAP Conference on Internal Controls, Compliance and Risk Management is coming to Copenhagen), I shared that François Beaume from AMRAE will deliver the keynote at this event in March. He will share his latest insights into current and future trends of risk management, audit, internal control, and insurance information systems. Some of the content he’ll discuss will actually come from the RMIS Panorama.

Let me summarize some of the aspects of this publication.

What is the RMIS Panorama?

It’s an analysis on market trends from AMRAE, updated yearly in partnership with EY.

What I find interesting about this survey is that it is based on responses from two populations: software vendors (and yes, SAP does respond to the questionnaire) and risk managers. What’s more, this Panorama “does not make any value judgments on vendors and their solutions, nor does it recommend their purchase. It is intended simply to provide a framework to present the tools and the main functionalities available on the market.” As a result, it’s an objective list of functionalities that risk managers, auditors, control and compliance departments, etc. use daily.

The 2019 edition benefits from collaborations with AGRAQ (Quebec Risk and Insurance Management Association), Club FrancoRisk (Francophonic Risk Management Club), IRM Qatar (Institute of Risk Management in Qatar), FERMA (Federation of European Risk Management Associations), PARIMA (Pan-Asia Risk and Insurance Management Association), and RIMS (Risk Management Society). It includes responses from 570 risk managers from over 36 countries.

What are the main findings?

In addition to the individual responses, the report highlights interesting market trends and observations:

Adoption: Just over half of risk managers have already used software (54%), and 68% of them are from large organizations. Clearly, there is still some way to go until market maturity.

Satisfaction: 71% of risk managers report being satisfied by using a solution. Even if I feel this is encouraging, it also indicates that nearly a third don’t seem to be reaping the benefits that they expect. From my experience and feedback from customers, this is often due to an approach where information is segregated between departments, and the “one view of risk” for reporting and mitigation is not available. This is despite having technological tools in place that would enable this.

Benefits: The study also highlights the top 10 benefits perceived in 2019 (versus their ranking in 2018):
1. Spend less time consolidating data, more time analyzing it (1)
2. Facilitate sharing of information (2)
3. Harmonize practices and reporting (4)
4. Facilitate cross-department analysis and avoid silos (3)
5. Optimize the sharing of risk management best practices (6)
6. Visualize real-time data (5)
7. Trust data reliability (7)
8. Secure sensitive information (8)
9. Be compliant with law/regulations (10)
10. Optimize transfer to insurance (9)

Modules: The top 5 that are requested when selecting a software solution for risk management are:
1. Risk mapping
2. Incidents management
3. Risk management on prevention
4. Action plan
5. Audit

Where to find out more

If you would like to learn more, join us at the SAP Conference on Internal Controls, Compliance and Risk Management March 3–4 in Copenhagen and hear firsthand from François Beaume, who leads this study.

In addition, to download the complete study, please go to the following pages: English version or French version.

I hope you find this Panorama as useful as I do. I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments on Twitter @TFrenehard

This article originally appeared on SAP Community and is republished by permission.

Follow SAP Finance online: @SAPFinance (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Facebook | YouTube

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Digitalist Magazine

HPE acquires identity management startup Scytale

February 4, 2020 Big Data

HPE today announced that it’s acquired Scytale, a startup providing tools that help engineers build identity-driven and large-scale distributed software, for an undisclosed sum. According to HPE fellow and general manager Dave Husak, cofounders Sunil James, Emiliano Berenbaum, and Andrew Jessup will join HPE, where they’ll develop cryptographic-identity technology that offers customers the ability to design, deploy, and achieve IT operational goals regardless of supplier or location.

“This acquisition … represents HPE’s ongoing transformation, part of which is to embrace and contribute to open source projects … Our goal is to deliver services and products that advance these developments, and provide our customers and partners with the fastest possible path to application modernization,” Husak wrote in a blog post. “It’s my pleasure to welcome this world-class team as they become part of the HPE family. The addition of Scytale’s talent, their expertise, and the power of their community will, without a doubt, accelerate our progress toward [our] goals.”

San Francisco-based Scytale — which raised $ 8 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition — was founded in 2017 by Jessup, Berenbaum, and James alongside a workforce hailing from cloud-native enterprises like Amazon Web Services, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk. It’s recognized as the founding contributor of the Secure Production Identity Framework for Everyone (SPIFFE) and the accompanying SPIFFE Runtime Environment, as well as other open source projects to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Scytale has its beginnings in a December 2016 gathering of engineers in Los Gatos, California on zero-trust (ZT) systems. There, a whitepaper pitched SPIFFE, an open ZT standard and toolchain that makes service identity ubiquitously available.

SPIFFE was first released in December 2017, after which the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) adopted the project. Since then, technologies such as Istio, Consul, Network Service Mesh, and more have incorporated SPIFFE, and organizations like Bloomberg, ByteDance, Huawei, Pinterest, Square, TransferWise, and Uber have committed significant resources to the project. Today, SPIFFE is used to authenticate to public clouds like Amazon Web Services, or databases like MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.

“Scytale’s DNA is security, distributed systems, and open-source. Under HPE, Scytale will continue to help steward SPIFFE. Our ever-growing and vocal community will lead us,” James wrote in a press release. “We’ll toil to maintain this transparent and vendor-neutral project, which will be fundamental in HPE’s plans to deliver a dynamic, open, and secure edge-to-cloud platform.”

HPE’s latest acquisition comes after the tech giant’s purchases of Cape Networks, Cray, and Plexxi, which similarly offer solutions to tackle hybrid and multi-cloud connectivity. In June, HPE CEO Antonio Neri pledged that all of the company’s products will be available as services by 2022, including subscription-based software and on-premises infrastructure that customers rent in a pay-per-use model.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Iguazio raises $24 million for AI development and management tools

January 27, 2020 Big Data

AI adoption levels are higher than they’ve ever been in the enterprise. According to a January survey conducted by Gartner, corporate use of AI grew 270% over the past four years. But developing, deploying, and managing AI applications at scale requires a platform that supports doing so, which is what startup company Iguazio provides. Its investors believe it has legs: Iguazio announced that it has secured $ 24 million in a funding round led by INcapital Ventures with participation from existing and new investors including Samsung SDS, Kensington Capital Partners, Plaza Ventures, and Silverton Capital Ventures, bringing its total raised to around $ 75 million following a $ 33 million series B in July 2017.

“This is a pivotal time for AI. Our platform helps data scientists push the limits of their real-time AI applications and see their impact in real business environments,” said CEO Asaf Somekh, who cofounded Iguazio in 2014 with former senior software developer and architect Orit Nissan-Messing and Voltaire colleagues Yaron Haviv and Yaron Segev. “With support from INcapital, Kensington Capital Partners, and our other investors, we are ready to expand our international team and reach our ambitious goals.”

Iguazio’s product suite collects data and preps it offline or offline, accelerating and automating AI model training for deployment via APIs. Event-driven streaming, time series, NoSQL, SQL, and files are among the types supported, which can be explored and manipulated by a real-time data layer that lets admins use a variety of protocols and concurrently read the data with third-party analytics and data science frameworks.

Nuclio, Iguazio’s open source serverless framework, streamlines machine learning pipeline steps like packaging, scaling, tuning, instrumentation, and continuous delivery with features like rolling upgrades, A/B testing, logging, and monitoring. Its MLRun open source framework parallelizes work within a single pod by wrapping engines around tools like Spark, Google’s Tensorflow, Horovod, and Nuclio, and it handles a range of triggers including HTTP and cron.

The Iguazio suite — which runs as in-memory databases on flash memory — continuously trains models in a production-like multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment, dynamically scaling graphics cards, processors, and memory and automatically tracking code, metadata, inputs, and outputs of executions in a reproducible fashion. (Admins can track the elements of all running jobs as well as historical jobs and store them in a single report.) The platform can run multiple experiments simultaneously and select the best model, and it facilitates the migration of this model from an integrated development environment to production.

Enterprise customers get an integrated offering they set up through wizards that help configure administration policies and notifications. Managers securely share data by providing direct access to it, so that employees are exposed to different elements according to predefined rules. The data layer classifies transactions with a built-in firewall that provides fine-grained policies to control access, service levels, multi-tenancy, and data life cycles, and that enables organizations to collaborate and govern across apps and business units without compromising security or performance.

There’s no shortage of orchestration platforms in the over $ 1.5 billion global machine learning market. Amazon recently rolled out SageMaker Studio, an extension of its SageMaker platform that automatically collects all code and project folders for machine learning in one place. Google offers its own solution in Cloud AutoML, which supports tasks like classification, sentiment analysis, and entity extraction as well as a range of file formats, including native and scanned PDFs. Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently introduced enhancements to Azure Machine Learning, its service that enables users to architect predictive models, classifiers, and recommender systems for cloud-hosted and on-premises apps, and IBM has a comparable product in Watson Studio AutoAI.

That’s not to mention rival startups like San Francisco-based Databricks and Explorium, which provide suites of enterprise-focused scalable data science and data engineering tools. But Somekh is confident in the robustness of the Iguazio platform, which he claims prevents 60% of faults and serves up to 500 real-time recommendations per second.

To this end, one new customer — digital payment platform Payoneer — recently deployed a proactive fraud prevention solution across four million accounts using Iguazio’s tools.

“Iguazio’s unique technology facilitates the data science creation process from start to finish, enabling enterprises to deploy AI applications that create real business impact,” said Kensington Capital Partners chairman Tom Kennedy. “With the opportunities we are seeing for machine learning technology and the global success stories emerging from this high-tech nation, Iguazio represents a great first investment for Kensington in an Israeli company.”

Iguazio is based in Herzliya, Israel, and has offices in the U.S., U.K., and Singapore.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Automate Your Wealth Management Marketing Processes

January 24, 2020 CRM News and Info

In recent years, “Trust the process” has become a siren song for athletes, heads of state, and corporate behemoths. While the phrase can mean many different things to many different people, I have a particular distaste for it. More often than not, trusting a process is mostly akin to hoping a problem magically resolves itself, but that hasn’t stopped it from plaguing small teams, large departments, massive corporations, and even entire industries.

So, for me, it’s simple. If a string of procedures is preventing you from reaching your goals, then what good are those protocols in the first place? We should look for areas where we can improve efficiencies and minimize the busy work and red tape that so often occupy our precious time. We shouldn’t “trust the process.” We should simplify and streamline the process. Don’t trust it, but don’t throw it out either. Make it better, easier, and more effective.

shutterstock 668526514 Automate Your Wealth Management Marketing Processes

Marketing is one profession that is notorious for an overwhelming amount of processes and procedures, especially in the wealth management space — where compliance plays such a vital role. And while I do firmly believe that process has its place in marketing, I’m also leery of its more paralytic properties. Luckily, I work for a marketing automation company, and we use our own software every single day — which means I’m one of those lucky marketers who has found a way to help improve our processes and make them work for me and our entire team.

Okay, enough stalling… let’s learn how marketing automation helps wealth managers and financial advisors streamline and simplify their processes while also minimizing busy work and cutting out red tape.

Track Behavior to Gain Investor Insights

Dated Process: Sticking to your gut and occasionally making decisions based on Google Analytics data

Modern Process: Tracking individual behavior online to deliver personalized and automated customer experiences

You probably have a pretty good idea of your target audiences’ interests and challenges, but this knowledge likely comes from previous experiences and gut instincts. With marketing automation, however, you can validate or disprove your suspicions by tracking user behavior on your website, landing pages, and emails. Once you understand how people interact with your digital content, you’ll be able to pinpoint where they’re at in the sales funnel and craft more personalized customer journeys. Not only that, but you’ll be able to turn anonymous website visitors into known leads.

The best part is that it’s actually fairly easy to do once you’ve implemented your marketing automation solution. Simply create and paste a small piece of HTML or JavaScript code on every page you want to track. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress or Drupal, you can paste the tracking code in one location, and the system will automatically add it to every page on the site. Once that’s done, install Google Tag Manager and add it to your web browser toolbar to ensure that all of your tags are working properly at all times.

You’re probably asking yourself how this is any different from your Google Analytics account. Well, GA is similar to digital behavior tracking in the same way that a back-up point guard on the JV squad is similar to Kobe Bryant. Whereas Google Analytics does allow users to measure the behavior of anonymous users, marketing automation tracking allows you to understand exactly who is doing what on your digital properties at all times and in real-time so you can respond to these actions with personalized messaging and offers. So if Jo Jo Siwa is browsing your site for a pair of rainbow-print shoelaces, you’ll receive a notification alerting you of that fact. You can then follow-up via email or retargeting on social media and Google with additional product recommendations.

Marketing automation can also help you track how your potential investors are interacting with your social media content, email messaging, and digital advertising. Suddenly, you have complete and transparent insight into actual key performance indicators that are unique to the individual user. And you can take things a step further by implementing lead scoring based on these behaviors, which will help you better understand how to treat and communicate with the lead as they progress (or regress) through the sales funnel.

Retain Clients and Grow Your Assets Under Management

Dated Process: Giving your clients the hard-sell over the phone and sending cold emails to uninterested prospects

Modern Process: Segmenting all of your audiences to deliver personalized marketing campaigns that drive asset management growth

This one got your attention, didn’t it?

Any financial advisor worth their salt knows that retaining, cross-selling, and upselling is the secret sauce to serious revenue, so you want to focus on your existing clients just as much (if not more) than your prospective investors. With marketing automation, you can properly scale your client roster and assets under management with more efficiency. And the best way to do this is through personalizing your content and messaging via segmentation and automated email drip campaigns.

You don’t have the time to send hundreds of individual emails to each and every prospect and client every single day. Even if you did, there’s no way you’d be able to keep it all straight and never send to the wrong address or attach the wrong link or attachment. With marketing automation, you can group all of your contacts into specific segments based on their demographics, behaviors, financial goals, and interests. Once everyone is placed in their proper faction, you can then deliver more targeted messaging that is uniquely suited to their personal characteristics and attributes. This way, you can get super specific about different investment opportunities depending on who you’re speaking to.

This is a serious game-changer for wealth managers and financial advisors, as a recent Salesforce study revealed that nearly 50% of investors would welcome personalized emails, texts, and other messaging related to their financial goals. And since one of the most common reasons that investors take their money elsewhere is because of their geographical distance from their wealth management firm, sending regular and relevant messaging and content is a good way to keep those relationships close — regardless of your proximity to the client.

Reach the Next Generation of Investors

Dated Process: Speaking with your client about creating a financial bridge between them and their next of kin

Modern Process: Attracting and nurturing younger generations directly in order to improve financial literacy and build trust

According to Forbes, roughly $ 30 trillion in assets are about to be passed from the Baby Boomers to younger generations. (Just writing that sentence gave me severe anxiety.) That is a lot of money to move from an educated, successful, and experienced group of investors to an unproven and inexperienced group of upstart beneficiaries.

The good news, however, is that what Millennials and Gen ‘X’ers lack in financial literacy, they more than make up for with their digital savviness. According to the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), “Approximately 80 percent of Millennials use their smartphone for transactional purposes like paying bills and depositing checks, and 90 percent use their phones for informational activities like tracking their spending. However, the GFLEC report goes on to say that smartphone usage for financial services management doesn’t correlate with individuals improving their financial practices. Therefore, it’s up to wealth management firms and financial advisors to deliver the right content to the right medium to help these younger generations of potential investors better understand their responsibilities and opportunities.

Of course, the best way to establish and foster trust is through education. Long before these green investors inherit their parents’ and grandparents’ wealth, you and your colleagues should be grooming them for financial maturity through long-term lead nurturing. And since these youngsters are so familiar with the digital landscape, you can create exciting customer journeys that grab their attention, foster their interest, and improve their knowledge and understanding.

Here’s an example of what one of those journeys might look like.

A young professional receives a promotion at work and begins exploring more advanced financial investment options
After searching “financial literacy for Millennials,” she clicks on your website
She does some light research but doesn’t request any further information or content
Over the next 30 days, she receives retargeting advertisements as she browses online
She clicks on an ad and is redirected to a landing page with a gated asset titled, “Improve Your Financial Literacy in 5 Easy Steps.”
She reads the content and begins to sharpen her financial knowledge and skills
Meanwhile, now that you have her contact information, you can place her in a custom segment and begin sending automated email campaigns
Tracking her behaviors and interactions, you’re alerted when she hits a certain lead score
At this point, you begin more direct and personal sales outreach with the hopes of securing her as a client early in her career
Once your new client has begun her investment journey, you continue to provide relevant and regular content and messaging for potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities

Once you turn on all of the switches, you simply wait for the data to roll in and A/B test and optimize as necessary. Everything is simple, streamlined, and efficient. And instead of trusting the process, you’re proactively attacking the process with less effort and better results!

Explore How Marketing Automation Helps Wealth Managers Cut to the Chase!

By streamlining your processes using marketing automation, you and your team will have the time and resources you need to develop and distribute more personalized content, refine your brand messaging and external communications, and provide the tailored support your prospective customers and current investors so desperately want and need. And since most of your competitors are still fumbling around trying to get their ducks in a row, the sooner you start combining great strategies with great technologies, the sooner you’ll be able to distance yourself from rival firms and appeal to your target audience.

If you’re ready to learn more about Act-On’s marketing automation solution, please contact us today to schedule a free demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

If you’re not quite there yet, we think you should download our eBook, “The 4 Main Challenges Facing Wealth Managers.” It’s full of great marketing automation stats, key terms, and information about how to overcome major obstacles facing the wealth management industry with this dynamic software.

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Act-On Blog

Setting up a Simple Case Management System on Dynamics

January 16, 2020 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The article assumes that you are a Dynamics consultant and does not try to technically guide you, but guides you so that you can quickly implement without missing key components

There are 3 main areas to focus on when setting up Case Management on Dynamics.

Case Settings

- Case creation
- Parent- Child Cases
- Queues and Routing

Contract/ Service terms
Knowledge Management

Case Settings

Two notable components of this section are Queues and Teams:

Teams (not linked to MS Teams) are groups with a common skill or belonging to specific departments, etc. responsible for certain tasks
Queues are support workloads which can be segregated by criteria. E.g. Priority and normal queues, premium customer queues, ‘specific product’ queues, Basic support queue, etc.

Once a case is logged, queues help segregate them and assign it to certain teams. Agents can pick up cases from the queues to which they are assigned.

Case creation

Source: While Dynamics supports the below sources for automatic case creation Email, Social activity, Task, Phone call, Appointment, Service activity, Custom activity, apart from Manual case creation and creation from email, a prerequisite for other sources would be that they need to be Integrated.

Subject: this can be a multi-level tree view but- this is different – it can only be added from Service Settings.

Conditions for case creation: When an email is received, some configurations/ scenarios to handle.

Create records for email from unknown senders.
Create case if a valid entitlement exists for the customer
Create cases for activities associated with a resolved case
Send automatic email response to customer on record creation

Parent-Child Cases

They are used to track multiple issues for a customer or track the same issue that’s affecting multiple customer or where work needs to be done by various departments for closure. While each case has its own details, a child case cannot have another child. The closure on such cases needs to be configured.

Options:

Close all child cases when parent case is closed
Don’t allow parent case closure until all child cases are closed
Allow parent and child to be independently closed

Queues and Routing

At the very base, there are 2 kinds of queues – Public and Private. Private queues are specific user queues and the Public queues are those which are accessible across Organization teams.

Queues are used to have a central storage of work and can be classified by:

Different products or services
Different subscription levels (regular, premium customers)
Various activity categories
Different geography

Routing: Cases and activities can be set up be automatically routed to Queues or be manually added to them. Rules for automatic routing can be set up and cases regrouped under queues. Routing rules can be used to even ensure that spam and unsolicited emails to a mailbox don’t create cases. Agents or Teams can be given access or set up that everyone in the Organization can access them.

Contract/ Service Terms

A few important concerns which most Organizations have:

Are cases of priority customers or on Premium support being handled as such
Are agents able to identify and pick up critical cases from the general cases
Are Service KPIs being adhered to and cases being resolved timely

To ensure that the above concerns are assuaged, this section is critical and key to ensuring that customers get the right value for their investment and Organizations, actual customer delight.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

SLAs are used to measure KPIs of the Service agreement with the customer. SLAs are associated with entitlements and the latter to cases. While Standard SLAs track minutes to failure, Enhanced SLAs set up, lets you Pause SLA time when case is on “Hold” and Initiate Action (On Success, Reminder for upcoming breach and Service Level breaches). Enhanced SLAs can be set up based on Geographies from where case is raised, Org. working hours and adding multiple conditions for a KPI to apply.

Entitlements

Entitlements are in layman terms, “contracts” governing support engagements. They are translated from the signed Work Orders and used to track the kind of support, customers are eligible for. Key configurations on entitlements:

Support terms – number of cases or hours
(if) support per Product or Service type purchased
Eligibility per channel of engagement -phone, email, etc.
Service Level applicable
Customer Contacts eligible
Contract Duration

A customer can have multiple entitlements and each entitlement can reference multiple cases. Entitlements can be made mandatory on Cases, to prevent any cases being handled out of contract.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Base

Dynamics Customer Service has a native Knowledge Base Creation, Management and Publishing mechanism.

A review mechanism to approve and publish articles is available where a certain role can create, and another approve. Knowledge articles can be classified under categories and can be defined as Internal or External.

If using the Dynamics or Powerapp Portal for customer service, KBs marked as Internal, will not be displayed there. Internal KBs can only be viewed within Dynamics.

Cases and KBs are closely linked, users can search through existing KBs while on case record and select a KB as the solution for case resolution.

The next steps after setting up Case management on Dynamics would be to:

1. Expose the application to customers using the Portal
2. Set up ‘chat bots’ on the portal for an omnichannel experience.

Work 365 is built on Dynamics 365 and has bi-synchronization with Partner Center, all subscription changes, billing, and payment status, and invoicing can be done directly from Work 365 with a click of a button, saving Partners and CSPS time and using multiple systems to keep their records in check.

Watch our webinars to see how Work 365 can help Indirect and Direct CSPs automate and reconcile billing and invoicing.

By Ismail Nalwala (contact me)

I am a Dynamics 365 enthusiast. I enjoy building systems and working with cross-functional teams to solve problems and build processes from lead generation to cash collection. Work 365 is a global developer of the Billing Automation and subscription application for Dynamics. Helping companies to streamline business processes and scale their recurring revenue.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Use Marketing Automation to Ensure Wealth Management Compliance

January 14, 2020 CRM News and Info

by Helen Veyna

Last updated January 13, 2020

Delivering timely and personalized communications is extremely difficult, especially in highly-regulated industries — a pain that wealth management marketers know too well. Financial advisors and marketers working for wealth management firms have to deal with compliance regulations (such as FINRA) that often limit what they can and cannot say and require them to implement communication archiving for audit compliances. And let’s not forget that, if they’re doing their job right, these individuals also have their hands full with trying to adhere to other common marketing best practices.

shutterstock 1044937822 Use Marketing Automation to Ensure Wealth Management Compliance

Producing compliant marketing initiatives takes a great amount of time and effort and often leaves little room for wealth management marketers to think big. In an effort to keep up with the tasks required and reduce the risk of violating any compliance regulations, many wealth management marketers choose to limit the scope of their communications and keep their efforts as generic as possible. The problem with this approach, however, is that bland and boring marketing is just as bad as not having any marketing at all — if not worse.

In today’s fiercely competitive market, customers are well aware that they have options and are accustomed to conducting their due diligence when it comes to performing research and thoroughly weighing their options. If you want your firm to stand out from the crowd, your marketing team has to be able to produce targeted communications that demonstrate that you understand your potential investors’ pain points and have what it takes to help them maximize their investment.

Thankfully, despite many obstacles, innovative and personalized marketing is not out of reach for wealth management firms that have the proper tools. Today, we’re going to outline some of the most common marketing compliance challenges faced by wealth managers and how marketing automation can help overcome them.

The 4 Challenges Facing Wealth Management Firms Banner CtA Use Marketing Automation to Ensure Wealth Management Compliance

Common Marketing Challenges Faced by Wealth Managers

Producing innovative and targeted marketing in today’s competitive environment is no easy feat, regardless of what industry you’re in. Marketers working in the wealth management industry, however, face a unique set of challenges due to operating within a highly-regulated industry and saturated market.

Building Brand Awareness: As more and more wealth management clients turn to search engines to research and evaluate their wealth management options, it’s becoming increasingly more important for wealth management firms to stand out from the crowd. To do this, wealth managers have to be very targeted with their messaging to reassure clients that they have their best interests in mind.

Maintaining Compliance (Finra): Compliance regulations often dictate what wealth management firms can and cannot say. Having to ensure marketing compliance often creates an extra step for marketing teams and makes it difficult to enhance and update their marketing efforts on the fly.

Antiquated and Disconnected Technology Limits Growth and Prevents Efficiency: Despite having many great ideas, many marketing teams lack the tools they need to execute them. Adding to that, many of them are using antiquated and disconnected technology that requires their team to spend their time on tedious manual tasks rather than tackling more impactful marketing efforts.

Keeping Up With the Demand for Targeted Marketing: Today’s consumers expect companies to provide them with content and messaging that will help them make informed decisions. However, delivering personalized marketing can be quite the undertaking for wealth management firms, especially for those that have small teams and lack the proper marketing tools.

These challenges, although common, are surmountable with the right tools. In the next section, we’ll walk you through how the right technology stack can help you eliminate these obstacles and implement best practices that will drastically enhance your marketing.

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Best Practices to Help You Stay Ahead of the Game

Having to adhere to compliance regulations shouldn’t limit your marketing team’s creativity or prevent them from delivering timely and targeted communications. Following these best practices will help you remain compliant while delivering targeted campaigns that make a lasting impression with your customers.

Implement Pre-Approved Marketing Efforts: Providing each of your audience segments with personalized marketing doesn’t mean having to take on more work than your team can handle. Developing pre-approved emails and campaigns prepares you to strike when the time is right.

Automate Your Marketing Efforts: Automating your marketing efforts allows your team to step away from tedious tasks and focus their time and resources where they’re likely to make the biggest impact. A marketing automation platform (such as Act-On) allows you to set up rules so these efforts automatically launch when a customer completes a form or meets a certain threshold or criteria. This enables you to continuously deliver relevant messaging and content so you can stay top-of-mind and establish brand recognition while reducing time and resources.

Segment Your Contacts to Deliver More Relevant Content and Messaging: A mistake that many wealth management firms make is launching marketing efforts that are one-size-fits-all. Segmenting your contacts into lists as you uncover more information about them allows you to deliver personalized messaging to stand out in their inbox and improve engagement.

Leverage a BCC Archiving Solution: Implementing an email marketing tool that syncs with a BCC archiving solution helps you easily store emails in one centralized location as you send out communications. This helps your company prepare for any future audits while eliminating the tedious task of having to manually archive emails.

Leverage Marketing Automation to Streamline Processes and Improve ROI

Up until now we’ve talked about how marketing automation makes it easy for you to produce marketing efforts that are compliant with industry regulations, but the right tool can help you do so much more. With Act-On, you have the features to improve alignment between marketing and sales, launch cohesive multi-channel campaigns, and measure your impact for continued improvement and proof of ROI.

If you’d like to learn more about how Act-On can help your wealth management firm to tackle common marketing challenges, we invite you to download our guide The 4 Main Challenges Facing Wealth Managers and How to Overcome Them With Marketing Automation.

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The Right Tool Makes Order Management Easy

December 31, 2019 CRM News and Info

If your experience is that order management software is slow, complicated, and frustrating, we’re betting it’s because you don’t have the right tool for the job.

Recently, a client came to us with the following challenge:

The client had developed an innovative product that fills a need in the marketplace. The good news is that the product has really caught on, and orders are pouring in. The bad news is that orders are pouring in, and their present software can’t keep up with the demand.

The client was looking for a simple, easy to use solution to manage their customer orders from conception through fulfillment to billing.

At P2 Automation, the challenge was right up our alley. Our technical understanding of business automation solutions, coupled with our practical expertise in small business operations, allows us to design business management solutions that meet our clients’ unique needs.

The P2 Automation team quickly identified the client’s need. They had a great product and they were willing to consider an alternative to their present system of marketing and delivery. All they needed now was an efficient method for automating their processes from initial order all the way through to billing and payments received. They needed the right tool.

We approached the project logistically by consulting with the client’s teams: Sales, Fulfillment, and Accounting. We observed how they had been processing orders and identified pain points and inefficiencies at each step of their process.

We found out that the out-of-the-box software solution they were using was the source of their slowdowns and bottlenecks. The software was far more complicated than it needed to be, and the time spent trying to figure it out and make all the components co-operate was causing frustration and delays. They wasted time with duplicate data entry during various stages and had a hard time seeing a 360-degree real-time picture of each order.

In this case we equipped the Sales team with an easy way to start the process with basic company and contact management tools, a simple tool for tracking activities and emails, and an Order Management Software module.

Once the Sales team has entered the order, the information generates a packing slip that goes directly to the Fulfillment department, so they know exactly what they need to get orders out quickly and efficiently. Then the information goes to the Accounting department where an invoice is generated. The whole process is simple, accurate, and efficient.

When you get a task done quickly and easily, it’s because you have the right tools. The right tool made all the difference. Our client now easily keeps up with the demand for their product and they’re already dreaming up the next big thing.

So, if you’re working on a project and you think it’s harder than it needs to be, ask yourself if you have the right tools for the job. If the answer is no, now is the time to schedule a strategy session with P2 Automation.

We can help you evaluate Microsoft Dynamics 365 and P2xRM to see what is the best fit for you!

Schedule a Strategy Session with our experts at P2 Automation today.

By P2 Automation, www.p2automation.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Growing Importance Of Customer Experience Management

December 29, 2019 BI News and Info

Part 1 of the three-part series “Why Customer Experience Management Matters“

Customers are more informed than ever and unquestionably consider experience as part of any research they do or purchase they make. They are also becoming increasingly demanding and price-sensitive, which is why, more than ever, it is becoming important to keep your existing customers.^1,2

But how does an organization set out to differentiate itself in the market while making its customers’ experiences exhilarating and memorable enough to keep them engaged, loyal, and willing to promote the product or service to others? How can these organizations manage tremendous amounts of customer data and generate meaningful information from it that will allow them to manage a complete, end-to-end customer journey and customer experience ecosystem? How can they leverage emerging technologies and trends while maintaining a lower total cost of ownership?

Customer experience (CX) is so much more than just measuring the “pulse” of your customers and your experience across a various touchpoints. It’s also about how your organization is set up to act on these experiences.

Differentiation through CX

With increasing globalization and greater micro-economic pressures, consumers are becoming more price-sensitive and less loyal because of their increasing diversity of options. This makes differentiating your organization even more challenging.

So, what do you do? Do you differentiate based on price? Product? Place? Promotion? Undoubtedly, these traditional marketing-mix elements have impacts on costs and profitability to varying degrees.

But how does an organization differentiate itself from a growing number of competitors in an ever-shrinking world? By providing a superior customer experience.

The goal of any organization is to make money by capturing the biggest wallet share amid the increasing challenges of rapidly evolving trends that have significant impacts on competitive and economic landscapes (Figure 1).³

Figure 1: Trends and Challenges Facing Most Organizations Today

These factors are putting organizations under increasingly diverse pressures and stressing the importance that business growth is driven by creating and maintaining loyal customers by providing first-class customer experiences.

What is customer experience management?

An experience occurs when a company intentionally uses services as the stage, and goods as props, to engage individual customers in a way that creates a memorable event.⁴ It is an attempt to engage with these customers at a level that precedes a materialistic experience and seeks to create an impact at an intellectual, emotional, and at times, spiritual level.

Customer experience management (CXM) is not just about managing touchpoints; it’s also about managing the end-to-end journey.⁵ This means that there are many influencing processes and activities that impact the customer experience, and not only those the customer touches or sees.

CXM is not CRM

CXM is often confused with customer relationship management (CRM).

CXM is a methodical framework that seeks to understand, analyze, and enhance customers’ experience as they progress through the organization’s end-to-end processes and policies and to closely manage those parts of the journey that have the greatest impact on customer loyalty.

While traditional CRM looks to maintain a 360-degree view of the customer at any point throughout their interaction with the organization, CXM relies on the information that can be extracted to help manage customer expectations and experiences.

Figure 2 CX Focus Growing Importance Of Customer Experience Management

Focuses on the quality of interactions with customers throughout the entire customer journey

Focuses on optimizing business processes that are associated with customers.

This article will be followed by a series of articles related to customer experience management, including achieving customer loyalty, building the customer experience strategy, avoiding pitfalls in the strategy, creating a customer experience ecosystem, and devising a journey map.

Sources

Temkin B.D., (2007), “Experience-Based Differentiation,” Forrester Research, p. 18.
Sellers P., (Autumn–Winter 1993), “Keeping the Customers You Already Have,” Fortune Special Issue, p. 57. See also Markey R., Reichheld F., Dullweber A., “Closing the Customer Feedback Loop”, Harvard Business Review, p. 1.
Mulins J.W., Walker Jr. O.C., Boyd Jr. H.W., (2003), “Marketing,” Edinburgh Business School, p. 384.
Pine J.B., & Gilmore J.H., (1998), “Welcome to the Experience-Based Economy,” Harvard Business Review, p. 98.
Rawson A., Duncan E., and Jones C., (2013), “The Truth About Customer Experience,” Harvard Business Review, p. 4.

For more insight, download a free whitepaper from IDC about how to drive a great customer experience from the design of new products, through to their operation at a customer.

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Digitalist Magazine

Satellite Imagery And ML For Vegetation Management For Utilities

December 20, 2019 SAP

Satellite Imagery And ML For Vegetation Management For Utilities

Bharti Maan

After remaining relatively unchanged for almost a century, utilities are adopting distributed automation as an answer to the economic challenges and significant quantitative and qualitative benefits in the areas of interruption and customer service, respectively.

Vegetation management has been a key issue for electric utilities, and it has largely remained a manual, contractor-driven process, with personnel on the field scouting (on the ground or by air) through the terrain and collecting data, securing permissions, and issuing work orders for clearance of vegetation encroachments. Using drones for surveys has also been helpful to an extent.

The combination of enterprise resource planning, satellite imagery, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) provide definitive answers to vegetation management challenges.

High-definition satellite imagery combined with multiple sensors can eliminate the laborious process of personnel on the field manually scouting through the terrain and collecting data.

ML/AI algorithms can process data to identify specific spots where vegetation might encroach or interrupt operations and help arboreal teams pinpoint specific spots for trimming or removing vegetation.

Dashboards can spot alerts raised by the algorithms.

Simultaneously using tree species’ inventory and weather data can further optimize systems.

Integrated ERP solutions can enable further automation for engaging contractors by planning and scheduling work orders and tracking execution updates within parameters set by the budget.

ERP solutions can be combined with mobile field solutions to enable field teams to capture details during vegetation trimming.

With the help of ML/AL, satellite imagery, ERP, and mobile solutions, the next new normal is fast approaching how utilities manage vegetation.

Learn what the energy sector is doing to become one of the Three Industries Where Technology Is Reducing Our Carbon Footprint.

About Bharti Maan

Bharti is the director of Innovation and Digital Transformation Advisory at SAP, architecting and mentoring digital transformation projects for key and strategic accounts of SAP. She is a thought leader and technology champion for disruptive technologies of cloud, data analytics, digital twins, AI, IoT, cognitive intelligence, and RPA. Her team ensures alignment to business goals by defining appropriate strategies and ensuring that “the rubber meets the road.”

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Digitalist Magazine

PrecisionHawk raises $32 million for drone management and analytics tools

December 11, 2019 Big Data

There’s a reason firms in agriculture, energy, and industry are increasingly opting to adopt drone-based monitoring and analytics products: They promise to cut down on operational expenses while removing human inspectors from harm’s way. According to a recent report, flying drones cost between $ 200 and $ 300 per mile compared to conventional helicopter flights that cost upwards of $ 1,200 to $ 1,600 per mile. And the Centers for Disease Control reports that from 2003 to 2013, the number of work-related fatalities in the oil and gas extraction industry increased 27.6%, with a total of 1,189 deaths.

A cottage industry has emerged to meet the demand, and one of the startups at the forefront is Raleigh, North Carolina-based PrecisionHawk. Founded as WineHawk Labs in 2010, an unmanned aerial systems and remote sensing company for wine producers, it pivoted in 2013 to general drone solutions and consultancy. This was prescient — the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forecasts that the drone industry could triple between now and 2023, with an estimated 823,000 drones flying by that time. And perhaps unsurprisingly, PrecisionHawk hasn’t had much trouble convincing investors to fund its ventures.

PrecisionHawk today announced that it’s raised $ 32 million from venture investors including Millennium Technology Value Partners, Third Point Ventures, Eastward Capital Partners, and others, bringing its total raised to over $ 130 million following a $ 75 million series D in January 2018. CEO Michael Chasen, who was recently appointed by U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao to chair the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee, said the fresh capital will fuel the continued development of PrecisionHawk’s software offerings and the company’s sales and market expansion initiatives.

PrecisionHawk raises $32 million for drone management and analytics tools

Above: PrecisionHawk: Roof damage assessment

PrecisionHawk offers an integrated platform of drone and sensor hardware, flight and analytics software, and services for businesses. The company helps clients to define their objectives and flight plans as well as their technology mix, and to tap turnkey flight software and a drone pilot network with over 15,000 licensed operators to collect and verify drone data. Clients can post offers for pilots on PrecisionHawk’s jobs board, which finds those with the appropriate skill level and facilitates payments and quality assurance. And they gain access to PrecisionAnalytics, a mapping and inspection solution that offloads data aggregation and annotation to machine vision, leveraging high-resolution imagery and GPS to produce models, measurements, and stitched-together maps.

For each customer, PrecisionHawk identifies the costs of solutions and forecasts a return on investment. Based on the area of interest, its flight operations leaders specify the necessary drones, sensors, and software before developing an approach that integrates with current operations and safety protocols. Then, they account for baseline quality requirements in orchestrating the overall program and — through partnerships with SAS, CapGemini, Salesforce, and consulting firms like Deloitte, McKinsey, and Booz Allen Hamilton — use third-party and in-house services and analytics to derive insights from collected data.

PrecisionHawk’s drone portfolio includes models from DJI, BirdsEyeView, and BFD. Sensors from MicaSense and others include lidar (with point clouds up to 500 points per square meter), thermal (which collects radiometric data), hyperspectral (which captures minerals and vegetation information), multispectral (which can see both visible and invisible light radiation), methane detection lasers, optical gas indicators, and RGB cameras. PrecisionFlight Pro, the complementary flight management software, helps to plan routes using a combination of digital elevation and 3D models.

PrecisionHawk’s drone management system lets program supervisors and operators input flight logs and track aircraft usage and maintenance, plus view hardware and pilot deployments as well as incident reports. On the analytics side of the equation, the firm’s solutions suite targets industry segments like distribution, transmission, oil and gas, and agriculture, automating the identification of component damage by cross-referencing uploaded imagery against distribution data. Furthermore, they automatically spot areas of concern such as cracked insulators, damaged cross arms, corrosion, leaning poles, pests, drought, and weeds, and they power services like plant counting, livestock health monitoring (from elevated body temperature), grove maturity estimation, volume measurements, and estimating plant vigor, leaf area, canopy cover, tree crown sizing, water quality, and more.

For instance, PrecisionAnalytics is able to generate a vegetative index, or an indicator of where plants in a field are healthy versus browning as a result of flooding, over-fertilization, or disease. A client can apply the index over collected aerial maps, which PrecisionHawk’s software calculates by ingesting the spectral values of each pixel and assigning a number representing plant health. PrecisionAnalytics offers a library of vegetation for a range of crops, and it sources from several vegetative indices (e.g., GRVI, VARI, NDVI, NDRE, SAVI, and ENDVI) to provide various means of assessing crop status.

The commercial drone market is edging toward becoming a $ 127 billion industry by 2020, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, and there’s been a corresponding uptick in venture capital investment in drone-related companies. Indeed, an estimated $ 454 million was plowed into UAV startups in 2016 alone, which included the likes of San Francisco-based DroneDeploy and San Carlos-based Prenav. More recently, Kespry raised $ 33 million in December to help companies capture aerial imagery through drones; Iris Automation raised $ 8 million to help unmanned aircraft avoid collisions; and DroneDeploy raised $ 35 million to further develop its drone management and logistics tools.

PrecisionHawk has done well for itself despite the competition, with strategic investments from enterprise customers and partners including Comcast Ventures, DuPont, NTT Docomo, and Yamaha Motor. It now counts among its customer base five of the top 10 utility companies, the largest provider of communications infrastructure in the U.S., major providers of seed and agricultural chemicals, the United States Department of Agriculture, and North Carolina State University.

“This is an exciting time at PrecisionHawk and the commercial drone industry overall as adoption of drones continues to grow at exceptional rates,” said Chasen. “Our unique software and services deliver incredible value to our customers, equipping them with the highest level of aerial intelligence to meet their current and future asset management and operating needs. We are pleased with this latest round of funding which will help us better address this surging demand, particularly in the energy and agriculture markets, and lead us into sustained profitability and growth.”

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