Technology Focus: CURO from Time4Advice

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1 Insight Innovation Inspiration Technology Focus: CURO from Time4Advice

2 Adviser Business Review editor Rob Kingsbury interviews Roland Rawicz-Szczerbo, sales director of Time4Advice, about CURO the firm s adviser CRM/back-office system

3 Technology for adviser firms RK: CURO is a relatively new contender in the backoffice space. What s its history since launch? RSS: We launched a beta version of CURO three years ago and signed up 12 firms immediately. These firms have been acting as testers for us. Feedback has been invaluable and has informed the development since then. Although all of the senior staff at Time4Advice (T4A) have a background in financial services, we are no longer practicing and so to have the benefit of insight into what firms have had to contend with over the last few years during which we have seen fundamental change across our industry has been invaluable. We are very grateful to them. In the last 12 months we have expanded our retail clients and now have a further 38 firms on board bringing our total to 50 clients which translates to 700 users in total now. We have quite a broad spread of clients but a good number are large IFA businesses. All of our clients were looking for a system much more aligned to the needs of more service-orientated businesses and so the appeal of an Enterprise CRM platform that has been expanded to include relevant financial services back-office functionality is massive. During 2013, we also won St. James s Place. This is a major coup for T4A and completely validates our approach to the development of CURO. We are coming to the end of a long integration of CURO into SJP head office. The system will be made available in time to all of the SJP Partners of which there are now in excess of 1,900 firms. All of these businesses are housed on one version of CURO. This goes to show just how scalable CURO and the MS Dynamics CRM platform is is the year in which we are launching the business in earnest and are looking forward to bringing on more of the right clients. After a period of significant investment Time4Advice is profitable and the future is looking very positive indeed. RK: The creation of CURO as a CRM system incorporating a back-office system is interesting, as most adviser firms probably think of their back-office system being the hub with a CRM bolted on to it. Can you go into more detail in terms of the thinking behind your approach? RSS: Post RDR everything changed. The business model under which the majority of IFAs operated has been turned on its head away from purely 3

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5 transactional businesses to being much more service orientated along the lines of professional firms like accountants and lawyers. This business model needs a very different technology solution than a business that is focused entirely on logging transactions. Service orientated businesses need to put their client at the centre of everything they do and as a result need software that supports this business approach. This is what customer relationship management (CRM) software does. It supports and facilitates a 360º view of the client and exposes data and allows users to intersect with that data in ways back-office systems are simply not designed to do. As a result of this and recognising the need for fundamental change, we decided that the best approach was not to develop yet another proprietary software system from scratch but to leverage the billions of dollars that firms like Microsoft invest to extend the capabilities of enterprise CRM solutions like MS Dynamics to make them relevant to our industry. Thus CURO. CURO is not a generic CRM system; it has been heavily customised to provide relevant data capture and back-office functionality in addition to offering proper CRM functionality as used by many of the global businesses. Time4Advice has already invested in excess of 10 man-years and many millions of pounds in the creation of CURO and we are just at the beginning of our journey. Since MS Dynamics is a global platform, we are able to bring fully integrated solutions (such as e-marketing and telephony) to market that no other business can do and as such we believe we can put clear water between what we are able to offer compared to the traditional back-office systems, which have hardly changed at all since the advent of RDR. RK: Adviser firms might say we ve got all our clients on a spreadsheet; their names and addresses are mail merged, our back-office gives us the functionality we need, so why should we change a system that s working? RSS: And that is entirely fine Rob, and we agree, we often see firms that have a proliferation of data across multiple systems, which may include back-office software, excel spreadsheets and 5

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7 other marketing platforms. Firstly, you have to ask why? The answer, of course, is that their current technology is not fit for purpose, which is why they have to compromise in this way. Given that the most important asset of any business is its data, can you imagine the effort required to keep all of that data in sync and up-todate? In reality, it never is and firms struggle with their data as a result. When we do transfer data from back-office systems, nine times out of ten, the data is just wrong. This must be a worry for businesses as how can they deliver any service if their most prized asset is wrong? Surely a more robust approach is to have one system that houses their data so that they only ever have one client view. Further, if that data can then be shared with other key software products so that they can avoid the need for multiple systems then this has to be a major step forward for any business. Importantly, we are not looking to bring on loads of new clients and so convincing firms to buy CURO is not what we are about. We are looking to work in partnership with a limited number of high quality firms that are not happy with their current technology because it is operationally inefficient and is holding them back from delivering the service that they aspire to deliver to their clients. In a true service-orientated business, the only thing firms have to sell is their time and their expertise. This means that they need to organise themselves to deliver on their promises. To do this, the right people need to be doing the right things all the time and the technology needs to support their processes and wherever possible, automate them. CURO is built on Microsoft s Workflow Foundation and offers our clients the ability to automate so many of the routine tasks that have to be managed manually currently. As part of our product development roadmap, we are in the process of creating a suite of template processes to allow firms to use automation out of the box and to understand that with a little imagination and some investment in their software, they can evolve a system that is exactly tailored around their business and fully supportive of it. RK: Looking specifically at the back-office, what functionality does CURO offer? 7

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9 RSS: Back-office systems track the sale of policies, manage remunerations and ongoing valuations. They also report that sales have been managed in a compliant way. CURO does all of the front-end client management, including full integration with MS Outlook and Office so all activities ( s, letters, appointments and tasks) are tracked right back to the client record. In addition it supports and records the planning objectives of clients, their requirements and any recommendations that have been made. If the recommendation is to invest in a particular product or buy insurance, then CURO tracks the sale in the same way any back-office does. If there is no product sale, then all advice is tracked and remuneration that is generated as a result, captured and held against the client file. CURO also supports the compliance management, T&C and CPD logging of all staff within a firm. RK: We re seeing adviser firms growing their business and acquiring disparate client banks. What problems can this cause technology in terms of scalability and the process of importing legacy data that may be in different formats? RSS: We have already discussed the importance of data. Merging businesses brings with it a major challenge as you would expect but we see this as an opportunity as it is often a catalyst to address the data problem once and for all. To be fair, approaching data from the top down often causes firms to review the best way of getting an up-to-date client database and there are many ways to do this. Probably the most reliable is to work alongside specialist data firms like Data Interface and Equifax. They have processes in place that capture source data from product providers and platforms and then reference this data against industry files to validate addresses etc. Time4Advice also has a great deal of expertise in working with data from legacy back-office systems to not only extract data from the systems but also to import the data into CURO based on a welldefined data process. In summary firms can: i. Transfer data from their back-office systems and then review and cleanse the data at review; ii. Take seeding data from the back-office systems and merge it with bulk data from providers and platforms; 9

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11 iii. Both of the above and further cleanse the data against industry files. We can help whatever route a firm wishes to take. The great news is that in CURO it is very easy to manage and maintain data and so once the data is in CURO, firms can look forward to having access to clean and contemporary data. RK: Efficient integration with third party systems is an issue that advisers raise that ability to have as seamless a process as possible. What s CURO s position in terms of integrations with fund managers, life offices and other providers? RSS: Our whole approach to business is to stick to what we know and develop the best CRM/ back-office system available. We will not develop planning or research tools, nor will be build client portals nor suitability letter writing platforms. Our whole approach is to work in partnership with other best of breed providers and then to integrate our solution with theirs in a meaningful way so that our mutual clients benefit from fully integrated systems. The same goes for consuming data from product providers and platforms. We have built CURO on a web services-based message hub that we have called Symmetry. This allows us to consume disparate data from multiple data sources and transform it into data that can be understood and consumed by CURO. So as you would expect, we offer both e-valuations and remunerations as part of our solution. Symmetry allows us to easily integrate third-party data feeds and we will be expanding the number of sources of data significantly during Our belief is that our clients want more than just data exchange and so our intention is to evolve CURO to operate in a much more integrated way with certain key providers in future, whether they are tools providers like Voyant or fund platforms. Our vision is to provide a seamless experience for users so that the transition from one solution to the next is natural and smooth. Watch this space RK: Security is another crucial issue for people how is client data protected when using CURO? RSS: CURO is entirely online and delivered either via a browser or as an integrated component of MS Outlook. Being online, our clients need 11

12 to be reassured in the security of our hosting infrastructure. Time4Advice operates a private cloud on the Outsourcery hosting environment. Outsourcery is Microsoft s preferred UK hosting partner and it was as a result of an introduction from Microsoft that we selected them to host CURO for us. Outsourcery s CEO is Piers Linney, who many will recognise as the Cloud Man on Dragons Den. Outsourcery offers complete security around data, which is why they are selected by many private, public and governmental bodies as their hosting partner of choice. RK: Finally, how do you see the adviser landscape in the years ahead and what part can technology play in making advisers working lives easier to manage? RRS: I believe in a vibrant advice community. Ever since I joined the life assurance industry in 1982, pundits have foretold the imminent demise of the professional financial adviser. Over 32 years later, the industry is going from strength to strength. Granted, things have changed fundamentally over the period but we are now all part of a more professional and sustainable industry. The reality is that people need advice. They want someone to reassure them that they are doing the right thing to take action in securing their families and their own future whatever the scenario they may face. Further, they need help to construct their financial affairs in the most advantageous way so that they don t pay too much tax or fail to provide for their families because they didn t do a Will or take out adequate insurance. Financial planning still needs to be sold and so long as individuals and firms are committed to delivering what their clients need, then there will always be an industry that we can be proud of. Technology must play a fundamental part in the delivery of service and support of any business. It is inconceivable that a business can manage in a highly regulated environment without the right tools. However, due to the changes in regulation and the impact that this has had on business models, the technology that businesses use must be able to be personalised to support the emerging business models and, of course, support a full client centric view. Thus CURO. 12

13 For more information on CURO David J Scarlett click here: Website: time4advice.co.uk Tel: [email protected] Adviser Business Review Editorial: Rob Kingsbury [email protected] Tel: Advertising: LEARN MORE Published by KGR Media Services Ltd KGR Media Services Ltd 2014