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Overlay App Released for Salesforce.com for Small Registered Investment Advisors

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

A recently released “overlay” for customer relationship management (CRM) platform Salesforce.com (News - Alert) will help small RIAs (Registered Investment Advisors) author and embed processes within Salesforce.com.

An RIA is a firm, registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC (News - Alert)) that offers advice and expertise on investing in securities such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, or exchange traded funds, and manages investment portfolios for clients. The overlay was authored by the technology arm of Foster Group, a large RIA firm based in Des Moines, Iowa.

The component, called Process Composer, is essentially a business process management (BPM) solution for wealth management firms. While BPM software is normally utilized only by larger companies, the Process Composer feature for Salesforce.com will put BPM into the hands of smaller businesses. While the entrepreneurs behind Process Composer work at a very large RIA, they bring domain expertise that is crucial to RIA CRM solutions, reports AdvisorsForAdvisors.

With the new overlay, smaller companies can author and embed processes in Salesforce: they can edit processes and create sophisticated workflows with dependencies, helping smaller RIAs customize their CRM system to their own needs, writes AdvisorForAdvisor's Andrew Gluck.

RIA firms can now buy a monthly license for Process Composer on Salesforce’s AppExchange. The license starts at $35 per month per user, and there are discounts available for firms buying more than 20 licenses.

Salesforce.com is the most popular and widely used enterprise cloud-based CRM solution in the world. The company, based in San Francisco, has more than 100,000 customers.

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