Considering Salesforce.com

for Your Family Office or Trust Company?

First of all, congratulations. Salesforce.com is an ideal choice for several reasons. Not only is it arguably the leader in SaaS CRM worldwide, but it offers several key benefits that support business strategy, including high levels of customizability and configurability, robust security and scalability support, and a well-populated marketplace of add-on applications to enhance workflow and functionality.

A CRM like Salesforce.com can be the perfect platform for UHNW fiduciaries and advisors in both family offices and trust companies, but it needs to be implemented specifically for their unique needs to create real value. Once completed, it can drive real benefits in efficiency, family member experience, and reporting by helping to organize, automate, and communicate effectively.

You will certainly face the following two challenges while considering this step. We offer our experience and advice from working closely with numerous family offices and trust companies over the last several years, and invite you to speak with us to learn more about how organizations like yours have successfully taken this step.

CHALLENGE #1

Planning to Tailor Salesforce to Meet the Specific Needs
of Your Family Office or Trust Company

What to INCLUDE in Your Implementation Plans

Three aspects of the architecture are critical in this regard.

First, it must handle multi-generational, multi-family relationships.

Second, it should have legal entity management at the forefront. It needs to be able to handle trust, LLCs, foundations, endowments, and the like as more than just add-on features.

Third, it needs to handle the typical UHNW portfolio; in addition to liquid portfolios it needs to be able to track and manage alternative assets such as hedge or PE funds along with real property such as real estate, art, planes, collectibles, oil and mineral interests, etc.

You can drive real efficiency by using Salesforce to automate entity onboarding, tracking tax return prep, managing payments or tasks related to real estate or other real property, tracking charitable contributions or gifts, reviewing and approving distributions or other bill payments and disbursements, producing Crummey letters, and other repetitive tasks. 

While Salesforce doesn’t have to provide document management itself, you should be able to access all your documents from within it–and make them available on a secured and permissioned basis to family members and outside professionals.

Whether coming from a portfolio management system or direct from custodians or banks, daily balances, positions, and transactions for accounts and funds should be available within Salesforce to drive efficiency and reporting.

You should be able to establish and access ownership interests in all your entities, assets, and funds, no matter how complex the hierarchical ownership structure might be.

Once all the information above is available in Salesforce in electronic form, a presentation layer attached to it makes sense, including the ability for family members to make interactive requests or edits. The presentation aspect can be done directly from Salesforce or through integration with third-party portal providers.

You should not be stuck doing business and using information in an inflexible format provided by Salesforce or an implementation consultant. Your implementation should be able to accommodate your unique needs and individualized aspects of otherwise common processes.

What to EXCLUDE from Your Implementation Plans

While planning your implementation, there are some bells and whistles that you should avoid trying to cram into your design. For these functions, consider leveraging the specialized software already available in the market that performs much better than the equivalent attempt at accomplishing in Salesforce.

  • Accounting
  • Portfolio Management
  • Financial Planning
  • Risk Analytics
  • Rebalancing

CHALLENGE #2

Calculating the Time and Money to Implement from Scratch
vs. Adopting a Pre-Designed Trust Admin Layer for Salesforce

Estimate Your Costs Carefully

It is critically important to be realistic in estimating implementation,  configuration, support, and admin time and costs before you begin.

If you are starting from scratch with Salesforce, implementing on your own or using consultants to build out the system initially and create all of the necessary financial integrations can be very expensive.

As you begin using it, you are going to want to make changes or create new processes or reports based on your experience. It would not be cost effective to have full-time internal administrators to do this and provide support, so you are back to expensive consultants.

Also, make sure you understand how this type of support and ongoing customization is provided and charged for; some CRM providers’ business models rely on substantial hourly fees for these services.

These implementation and ongoing support fees can be more than your subscription or licensing fees for the actual CRM software and can vary widely among providers, so it is important to include realistic estimates and not just focus on annual subscription fees and initial implementation estimates.

Estimate Time & Experience. Build vs. Buy

It is also important to be consider the time required to tailor Salesforce to meet your needs. If you are considering this approach with a consultant’s help, remember that there are very few consultants that have deep domain expertise with family offices or trust companies. Therefore, you will have to spend time educating them on your processes and data, while they teach you about Salesforce’s capabilities.

They will then have to build out all those data objects and processes from scratch. And, they will have to work out the bugs with you. That all takes time. Not to mention identifying the sources of data for the system and performing data hygiene before loading.

Note that costs and impact must be considered for both the initial implementation phase as well as long-term support use.

Why WealthHub is an Ideal Approach to Use Salesforce for Family Offices or Trust Companies.

  • WealthHub is built on Salesforce.com, and therefore is infused with all of the configurability, flexibility, security, and scalability inherent in the world-class CRM.
  • It was designed specifically to automate the daily functions of a trust officer or other fiduciary professional and provides visibility, reporting, controls, and compliance assurance for trust company management.
  • It delivers significant gains in productivity while improving the investor experience and giving management peace of mind that fiduciary obligations are being fulfilled.
  • As a OEM partner, WealthHub offers cost-effective Saleforce.com package pricing while delivering both CRM and Trust Administration functionality.
  • WealthHub's team is very experienced in the workflows of family offices and trust companies which avoids the need for learning the priorities and must-haves for your office.
  • The WealthHub team implements the exact solution you want and helps maintain the functionality and operation you need to support your office year over year.

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