The relationship-changing magic of tidying up
How consolidating systems at a financial institution meant more time for clients.
FROM 26 SYSTEMS TO ONE BUTTON IN JUST 6 MONTHS
The Situation
Tidying up was a recent pop culture phenomenon rooted in a simple concept: cluttered environments distract and weigh us down. Clutter naturally accumulates over time; removing it, the thinking goes, opens space and clarity for what really matters.
With a history spanning more than a hundred years, one global financial services firm had not only served generations of clients faithfully—it had accumulated its share of clutter. Clutter in the form of the information systems used to service those very clients.
In fact, if you were a financial advisor at the firm as recently as 2019 and needed to retrieve information for clients, you’d have to toggle between 26 independent (and redundant) systems, not to mention paper files and sticky notes. This kind of digital clutter was a massive drag on advisors’ time and attention—time that could be better spent on things that really mattered. Things like better understanding client needs, following up on customer growth opportunities, or building the kind of agile, scalable environment that enables innovation. Things like building relationships—the lifeblood of financial advisory.
The firm needed a good tidying. It needed to consolidate its systems to a single source of truth. Specifically, it needed a digital transformation to a new advisor platform with a holistic, centralized view of the client, robust client support capabilities, enhanced reporting features, and tools to empower collaboration between and within teams. So it turned to Deloitte Digital and Salesforce to help.
THE SOLVE
Over the coming months, Deloitte Digital and the firm would work side by side to create a companywide Financial Services Cloud (FSC), starting with one question: Why? Why were advisors collecting the data they were?
Why ask this question? Because effective digital transformation isn’t about converting paper to PDFs; it’s about finding the best tools to help people realize their business ambitions. So the team concentrated on achieving clarity around advisors’ needs in servicing clients. They did this through personas and journey maps and used those findings to inform the Salesforce design, then to craft a change management strategy that would accelerate buy-in and adoption.
By the six-month mark, the team had integrated information and processes from several legacy systems into the FSC, creating a custom-tailored, single solution that gave the firm’s financial advisors instant access to the client information they need to better help clients achieve their financial goals.
Rather than digging for client data across multiple systems to get a complete and accurate picture of who they were serving, this solution made it intuitive for advisors to understand what their clients needed and provided insights to guide “next best actions” in the best interests of client goals. Instead of digging for a 360-degree view of the client, that view was surfaced to advisors in context of the client.
SHOWING UP FOR CLIENTS WITH EMPATHY AND INSIGHT AT MOMENTS THAT MATTER
The Impact
The declutter was a success: 26 different solutions were combined into a single CRM, leading to a 92% increase in daily Salesforce logins. Where before the firm’s sales assistants spent up to four hours preparing for client meetings, now all the information financial advisors need is available through the Salesforce solution at the click of a button, allowing for a holistic client view and more time for what matters most: developing and personalizing relationships. Because with the added data fidelity and resulting insights, clients could feel seen and known—regardless of whom they connected with at the financial services firm.
In fact, the entire system is designed to support and develop relationships. FSC relationship maps and reciprocal role objects provide structure, as well as visual representations of relationships, and an easy way to input new ones. The result: a 200% increase in opportunity pipeline.
And with Einstein Analytics, the firm can build dynamic homepages for financial advisors, client associations, and management users, with data visualizations that bring key metrics and actionable data to the forefront. This newfound agility is helping to ensure the firm’s customers are in good hands, even in times of economic uncertainty.
And the story’s not over yet: Deloitte Digital continues to support the firm, further elevating the advisor experience with added desktop tools and a mobile solution that gives advisors the flexibility they need to build trusted relationships with clients wherever they are.
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