4 Challenges of Modern Investment Banker Solved with Salesforce FSC [FREE GUIDE]

On an average, investment bankers work around 80 hours a week and some weeks for as much as 100 hours. Technology can greatly improve the efficiency and productivity of investment bankers. Investment banking firms are currently facing the following challenges:

1. Deepening client relationships
2. Achieving Cost Reduction
3. Improving Deal Lifecycles
4. Data Regulations and Compliance

Additionally, the emergence of FinTech firms, that rely heavily on technology, has also forced financial institutions to rethink their approach to leveraging Cloud platforms and AI in Investment Banking. Underwriting volumes have dropped significantly, M&A deals are taking longer to close and Advisory services are in dire need of strategic transformations. 

As an Executive Sponsor, Banker, or IB Analyst, this article resonates and outlines how Salesforce Financial Services complemented by Cloud Peritus’ expertise can provide a compelling solution to all of the above challenges.

Deepening Client Relationships

Maintaining and strengthening client relationships is crucial for the success of investment banking firms. Whether senior investment bankers need a warm introduction to a potential client, or for investment banking analysts supporting the senior banker to review keynotes from past transactions/interactions to create the perfect pitch - an intelligent solution that can bring all your data related to your clients that are otherwise locked away in someone’s head, a bunch of spreadsheets, or across legacy systems can significantly help. Additionally, the average deal cycle is 12 months or longer making it even more important to be focused on maintaining and strengthening relationships with key stakeholders. Salesforce’s Financial Services cloud combined with Cloud Peritus’ accelerators can unlock the critical insights needed to help investment bankers. Additionally, investment bankers can unlock key relationship intelligence by harnessing the power of Corporate leadership data provided by trusted data sources such as Equilar, combined with the investment bank’s activity data across clients’ contacts and relationship scores to help. The investment bankers can subscribe and view all critical events - financial, changes in leadership, etc. about clients they are pursuing so they never miss a critical update.

Achieving Cost Reduction

The success of FinTech can be attributed to its reliance on and adoption of Technology - specifically, Cloud-based platform implementations, automation, and Artificial Intelligence. This has proven to be highly beneficial for lowering operational costs, reducing capital expenditure, and having heightened connectivity. 

Investment Banking institutions could reap the benefits of Salesforce’s FSC capabilities. As an Executive Sponsor at a financial institution, you would be focused on containing costs and increasing fee revenue over the next Fiscal cycles. This can be achieved by enabling the deal management teams with the right tools. Salesforce’s FSC, in conjunction with industry-standard data sources like Equilar, FactSet, Pitchbook, and S&P Cap IQ provides:

• The flexibility to view deals on the go (mobile, tablets), 
• Enable the teams to configure and customize Salesforce FSC platform that best fits the business needs and 
• Utilize Salesforce’s Genie to prompt data-driven next-best actions. 

Embracing Salesforce as a centralized system of engagement helps the Executive Sponsors to realize a reduction in capital and operational expenditures on infrastructure, whilst achieving higher efficiency of the teams. Providing a collaboration platform that is compliant and allows mandates to be visible and accessible to designated deal team members greatly improves efficiency.

Improving Deal Lifecycles

The day-to-day life of an Investment Banker heavily revolves around building and nurturing relationships with existing and potential clientele, deal sourcing/origination, due diligence & deal execution. Traditional methodologies used to accomplish each of these job functions require the Banker to log into a distinct source system. Collaborating with internal and external deal participants is complex and extremely challenging. Our solution can be configured to execute automated workflows based on deal type while being compliant. Investment bankers can take advantage of deal templates to execute mandates. Integration with Outlook, Slack, Office 365 and Google Drive allows users to collaborate. Granular sharing and permissions allow compliant and secure data sharing. Guided workflows allow the users to focus on the mandate and never miss any important step in executing it. Let’s consider an M&A scenario at Silver Marble Investment Bank and how Salesforce FSC capabilities, in combination with our solution, can alleviate some of the Banker’s pain points. 

Mergers & Acquisitions Scenario

Silver Marble Investment bank has recently been selected by 123 Health Care, Inc. to be their sell-side advisor. The next steps would be to perform a preliminary sell-side due diligence process to understand 123 Health Care’s business in detail. Throughout this process, data is gathered and used to prepare the teaser and confidential information memorandum (CIM) to market 123 Health Care, Inc. Traditional methods require documents to be sent via emails or via secure data sharing platforms and co-ordination can require multiple back and forth and adhoc email requests. Our solution accelerators built on top of Salesforce’s FSC allows the creation of a virtual data room with limited access to identified parties at 123 Health Care, Inc and allows Silver Marble bankers to perform the due diligence process in a pre-defined and guided manner. The next step is to identify a buyers’ list; creating a buyer universe is critical to the success of the sell-side transaction of 123 Health Care, Inc. Our configurable buyer matching algorithms built on top of buyer data available through Integrations with S&P CapIQ, Factset, PitchBook, etc. allows the buyers' list to be created. From confidentiality agreements signed by potential buyers to closing the transaction at each step of the M&A process, Silver Marble can collaborate and share important information with 123 Health Care, Inc, potential buyers, banks, legal, etc. all from a single CRM platform powered by Salesforce’s FSC and Cloud Peritus’ solution accelerators.

Data Regulations and Compliance

Investment banks face challenges of violating regulatory and compliance requirements resulting in significant monetary and brand damage. Salesforce’s FSC comes built-in with Robust access control solutions and allows Investment bankers to wall-off sensitive and confidential information. Granular sharing rules help controlled collaboration both internally and externally. Additionally, rules that systematically prevent the violation of regulatory and compliance guidance can be implemented to establish a controlled framework. Restricting access to Material Non-Public Information just got easier with the Deal object data model in Salesforce FSC. Our solution accelerators allow us to automatically cascade these access controls to virtual data rooms. Our solution accelerators address internal audits via the audit framework on top of Salesforce FSC’s offerings such as Event Monitoring and audit history tables.

Our solution accelerators built on top of Salesforce’s FSC will help investment banks to eliminate swivel chairing, data silos, and the need for investment bankers to be the human APIs, better manage their pipeline, deepen client relationships and accelerate collaboration across deal participants while remaining compliant.

To book a free consultation with us or to learn more about our solutions and offerings please reach out to info@cloudperitus.com.