I am a recovery counselor. I spent over 12 years in that role. I grew up in this business. Right out of college, I started an internship, which turned into what has now been my career with essentially the same firm. IN 2017, Merit became a new company. We tripled in size. We were big in the M&A space.
Merit made a significant investment in technology in late 2020 or early 2021, which was the culmination of why I went headfirst into technology. I've always had a passion for it and now that I was anonymous and making an investment, I was excited. Passion drew me to him.
In 2022, I jumped into the technology space full-time, seeing how technology can impact the way we do business at the branch level for clients. I gave up on most of my clients. I still have a $20 million book of critical friends, family, and clients who don't want to move on to another relationship. I keep them, but 95% of my time is spent on technology.
CRM: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud
We've been at Salesforce since 2019. We started out of the gate with a Cloud overlay for Financial Services. Part of our investment in technology led to the development of an investment team. Before it was me and an assistant. Now we are a team of 12 people. We have had a significant increase in inspection. Part of that was bringing in someone with extensive development skills at Salesforce. This has transformed the way we use Salesforce today: how it looks, how it feels, how we interact with it. It has been a labor of love to customize the Salesforce platform.
Reporting and Portfolio Management; Trading & Rebalancing: Orion Advisor Solutions, Orion Eclipse
We have Orion Advisor Solutions integrated into Salesforce. We use Eclipse by Orion for trading and rebalancing. We're trying to build that one-stop shop. Orion has done a great job within that integration. This allows you to use Orion but not leave Salesforce, which is nice.
Financial Planning: eMoney Advisor
In use eMoney for financial planning. We have supported eMoney and MoneyGuidePro by Envestnet. But being in the M&A space, we realized that 90% of the firms we buy, if they're doing financial planning, they're doing it with eMoney. From a scalability point of view, it didn't make sense to maintain multiple platforms when they could be consolidated into one and rely on heavier eMoney integration.
Client Portal: Asset Access
We use Wealth Access as our consolidated client portal. We have many options when it comes to how customers can access their accounts, be it directly through custodians or eMoney. But we chose to go through Wealth Access as the provider for that portal to pull it all together in a consolidated view. It's something we can count on. It's a consistent experience that isn't driven by a guardian or financial planning tool. It allows us to be more agile when we create more relationships with new financial planning tools or if we want to move away from eMoney. Plus, if we wanted to add a guardian, it would bring stability in a multi-guardian environment.
Document Management: Microsoft SharePoint
We use Microsoft SharePoint. We recently migrated from a cloud server experience to Microsoft SharePoint. We will look at integrating Microsoft SharePoint into other systems such as Salesforce, for example, as a document repository. This way, we don't leave the documents in Salesforce properly. We are trying to have them live within Microsoft SharePoint. That way, we have that single source of truth.
As told by reporter Rob Burgess and edited for length and clarity. The views and opinions are not representative of the views of WealthManagement.com.
Want to tell us what's in your fortune? Contact Rob Burgess at (email protected).