The Situation

Three years ago, Investment Services Group existed as a collective of different operating models, explains ISG CEO, Richard O’Brien. “We had a lot of work to do to establish a co-ordinated group, supported by a common infrastructure.”

With entrepreneurial DNA, a focus on growth, industry leadership, and a commitment to ensuring the client is front and centre in all decisions, ISG wanted to build a modern, cloud-based platform for the future. This needed to be contemporary and scalable, while eliminating complexity and enabling insight right across the group’s businesses. The system needed to bring together multiple disparate systems to provide a single, consolidated view of each customer.

This solution would be critical in helping ISG to stay ahead of regulatory and compliance requirements in an ever-changing and fast-moving sector. It would allow them to move away from the constraints of “old school” systems and processes to a position of true industry leadership and total client centricity.

Challenge

With each of ISG’s brands bringing their own systems and processes, group-wide visibility of information did not exist. It was challenging to draw meaningful insights from the data and significant operational complexities existed within the business.

“Trying to understand what the data was telling us and bring it together in any meaningful way was enough to make people tear their hair out,” Richard says.

Additionally, many processes were manual, paper-based and time-consuming.

CFO Niall Hartigan explains, “To give one example, adviser investment reviews and proposals would take more than two weeks to prepare and this would quite literally be a paper-based process involving hardcopy records being passed between the Adviser and their assistant. We now have an online collaborative approach using a process which automatically extracts information from various sources.”

ISG recognised the need to consolidate information and streamline processes across the group. Given the pressure of major – and ongoing – legislative changes on the horizon, it was time for a solution.

Solution

“One of the first steps for us was to look at things from a technology point of view and understand whether it was necessary for each business to continue operating its own different platforms, or whether there was a more comprehensive single platform that we could transfer all the businesses onto. In short, there wasn’t, so we accepted that each business needed to continue to operate on separate platforms,” Richard says.

“From there, what we wanted to know was: Is there a common or cohesive layer, in the form of a CRM, that we can put over the top of these systems to bring them together so that clients won’t have to see or worry about any of the complexities of the systems under the surface?”

Niall describes the chosen solutions – Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, with MuleSoft providing the critical middleware layer – as a case of excellent timing and great fit.

“We had been investigating possible solutions for a while, during which time Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud launched, which offered us a one-stop shop for everything that we wanted and gave us more than 90% of what we were looking for out of the box.”

Financial Services Cloud’s ability to map all kinds of relationships between people, companies and trusts would prove instrumental to the implementation’s overall success. Equally, having MuleSoft in place as the integration layer to do the “heavy lifting” of connecting every source system with Salesforce was critical in allowing “all the necessary complexity to be shifted into the background,” Richard says.

“In an industry like ours,” he adds, “where so many things tend to reside on many different source systems, it makes perfect sense that you need something in between these to do the translation work for you.”

ISG’s solution represents ‘firsts’ on two fronts, as both New Zealand’s first Salesforce Financial Services Cloud implementation and first MuleSoft CloudHub implementation.