California-headquartered Salesforce is introducing a new offering for financial advisors, focused on leveraging analytics.

Salesforce, the global CRM platform, has rolled out Wave as part of its Financial Services Cloud product, designed to help advisors identify client opportunities and maximize their time.

“Today's clients have their wealth scattered across multiple banks, wealth management firms and 401k custodians, causing a proliferation of disjointed financial data,” Salesforce said. “Financial advisors struggle to stitch together this disjointed data, and other critical client information, across outdated, siloed systems. In fact, just 7 per cent of wealth managers use technology to segment their clients by age, and none do so by gender.”

The goal of Wave is therefore to empower advisors in a number of ways, the firm explained. Firstly, it enables advisors to segment clients by age group, activity type, investment area and financial goal progress, among other categories. (For example, they can easily identify which clients were affected by a recent shift in the market or have made a significant deposit and now require extra guidance, it said.)

Additionally, with the 80/20 Dashboard - based on the theory that 80 per cent of advisors' revenues come from 20 per cent of their books of business - users can quickly identify high-value clients, and prioritize activities and time accordingly. The idea here is that “advisors can prioritize every hour of their day by comparing client revenue against advising activities,” Salesforce said.

Meanwhile, because Wave is embedded in the firm's Financial Services Cloud, advisors can now view clients' progress toward saving for life goals - such as buying a new home or planning a summer vacation - and then reach out with advice and recommendations to those who are not on track.

Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud - launched last year - also helps advisors in the areas of client onboarding, account aggregation, security and compliance (see a related article here). 

“The advisor-client relationship is no longer just about helping a client to build wealth. It's about helping the client to achieve life goals,” said Rohit Mahna, general manager of financial services at Salesforce. “Wave for Financial Services Cloud gives advisors the ability to visualize personal and market data in the context of their client's goals, helping guide conversations about their investments. It's all about valuable insights that lead to action.”

Wave will be generally available in the fall of 2016.