LourdMurray, a firm that operates as life-long advisors, bringing its clients comprehensive solutions ranging from investments and insurance to education, retirement, and wealth planning, prides itself on delivering refined expertise to accomplished clients that have complex financial and professional lives.
This firm is an independent, fee-only wealth manager that specializes in serving business leaders, artists, athletes and other high-achieving individuals. LourdMurray helps clients strategize through unique financial goals and issues, such as sudden wealth, complex pay structures, concentrated exposures, elevated privacy needs, and unpredictable cash flows.
LourdMurray relies on a scalable technology platform for growth that can drive efficiencies and flexibility as part of its business model for this unique financial clientele. We need to balance our complex service model, so our philosophy is to have a nimble, scalable tech stack that provides the necessary efficiencies,” says Jill Young, CCO for LourdMurray. “With a team of 26 people, we serve $4 billion in AUM, so our technology is a key aspect of how we operate.”
Young started her career at LourdMurray with substantial previous role background in working with, consulting on, and deploying CRM systems. A recent project she led with her team at LourdMurray was to find and replace the firm’s previous CRM system with a more up-to-date, industry-specific version of Salesforce. “Our older system basically just sat idle as no one used it, due to its poor implementation and difficulty in usage,” Young explains. “If you don’t get the buy-in from employees, it will never get adopted.”
Along with being up-to-date, this new system needed to have better user experience and tight integration with LourdMurray’s performance reporting and current portfolio management system, SS&C Advent’s Black Diamond® Wealth Platform. With such requirements, SS&C’s Salentica CRM was the obvious choice. Salentica Elements, a turnkey, configurable solution built on the Lightning Platform by Salesforce. “What sealed the deal for us was that both Salentica Elements and Black Diamond are part of the SS&C family, so we knew there would be compatibility and a strong support model,” Young said.
One Salentica benefit that stood out among the others was the ability to streamline the emails and calendar entries that previously landed differently with each client service personnel. “We no longer just have one general inbox for service requests, as that let things to fall through the cracks and was very inefficient,” Young says. “Now, with Salentica Elements, we can eliminate that one shared calendar in Outlook and run everything through the CRM.”
Now, LourdMurray is able to develop tight workflows and task assignments that are consolidated in Salentica. “Now we have much better communication across the firm and the chat feature really streamlines our processes in getting business done.”
Moving forward, Young is excited about being able to tap into business development capabilities in the Salentica CRM. “In the old system, there were just a bunch of dated names, with no other information or tracking about the prospects, which was very limiting. We will be building out these capabilities with new reporting, which will be much more effective.”
As a CRM expert, Young advises firms to have patience during transitions to new systems and ensure there is a firm-wide training up front. “You really need to take the time to learn the system, even if you are familiar with technology,” she says.
To learn more about LourdMurray, visit their website at http://www.lourdmurray.com.