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

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.

Anyone and everyone in the corporate and investment banking space understands that the right CRM solution can help with everything from increasing lead conversion and personalizing customer journeys to improving customer experiences and loyalty, tracking data between departments and, ultimately, boosting sales. And yet, even though your CRM may claim to give you a better understanding of your customer, there are two words that make all the difference to how effectively software does this: relationship hierarchy.

Unlike wealth management, where relationship hierarchy is about single hierarchies that focus on a household, there are actually multiple hierarchies when it comes to corporate and investment banking. Here, these hierarchies focus not just on clients and their financial health but also look at risk, legal and other relationships that allow bankers to get a holistic view of what makes the most business sense for a client.
The importance of relationship hierarchies

Corporate and investment banking is about giving customers the best possible solution for their financial needs. This is possible only with information about the customer, and a comprehensive view of the customer’s profile. This profile is enhanced when a banker has access not just to the customer’s financial health, but to relationships in the customer’s life that have a direct impact on his or her finances. Subsidiaries, organizational changes, networks, and their interdependence can all be used to create a 360-degree view of a customer, and this can be managed only by how effectively a CRM solution integrates this data in the form of relationship hierarchies.

Think of it this way: If you have a comprehensive overview of a customer’s financial profile, along with information about their subsidiaries, net worth, and market-related events that may impact their financial health, all at the click of a button depending on how deeply you wish to understand this customer, doesn’t it make sense that you will be empowered to recommend products or services that fit their needs better?

How does it matter to corporate and investment banking?

The more appropriate question is, how does it not? One of the biggest challenges, when it comes to corporate and investment banking, is meeting customer expectations. This must be done while understanding their specific needs and providing them with solutions that work, and speed is of the essence.

Superior customer service depends upon a comprehensive customer view. A CRM solution that understands relationship hierarchies helps corporate and investment bankers personalize customer relationships at scale and deliver digital-first engagement, while simultaneously personalizing customer journeys and making it possible for marketing efforts to be better targeted and more effective. This also boosts sales because relationship hierarchies help identify specific opportunities for a customer or someone in the customer’s immediate circle.

How does NexJ CRM manage relationship hierarchies?

NexJ CRM works with some of the world’s biggest corporate and investment banks. These financial institutions choose our product because our Relationship hierarchy presents contact and organization relationships in a network graph, allowing users to view details of the primary relationships, as well as relationships between subsidiaries. NexJ CRM empowers corporate and investment banking professionals to view and manage the financial products, and related transactions, from multiple back-office systems, for each customer.

All of this information about products and opportunities can be aggregated and rolled up along each contact’s defined relationship hierarchies, enabling users to view opportunities by Bank hierarchies (territorial manager, etc.) or customer hierarchies, and tracking how profitable each relationship is in real time. Our CRM also supports one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and relationships between accounts and subsidiaries throughout the system, tracks sales performance, and seamlessly integrates with third-party relationship management solutions.

Users can also segment their assigned accounts into multiple “portfolios” by creating multiple hierarchies, and financial data can be aggregated along territorial hierarchies as well to analyze performance at multiple levels.

NexJ CRM, unlike most other vendors, places a huge emphasis on deep relationships. Relationship hierarchies are central to building trust, because they enable advisors to understand their customers better, give them a comprehensive view, and help them understand their motivation which, in turn, empowers them to make more informed and effective recommendations.

To find out more about relationship hierarchies, and how they can help corporate and investment banking organizations understand their customers better, why not talk to us? We believe business is about relationships, and we take our relationships very seriously.

Author: Adam Edmonds

Vice President, Products

With almost 2 decades of experience developing customer management solutions in financial services and insurance, Adam Edmonds is responsible for establishing overall product vision and designing easy to use solutions that solve real market problems.

Adam is excited to share the lessons he has learned and his insights on where the industry is heading with readers of his blog. He encourages readers to join the discussion or reach out to him with their own insights, best practices, and solutions to industry challenges.