Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for Private Equities - Why now and How?

With roughly $6.3 trillion of assets under Management, 13500+ Private Equity firms, and billions of dollars in dry powder, thousands of PE firms are competing to put their investments to good use. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, “2021 was a record year for the PE industry as investment activity surpassed the trillion-dollar mark for the first time. In total, 24,520 deals were closed, with an aggregate deal value worth $1.04 trillion, nearly double the amount from the year before. At the same time, deal volume grew by 41.6% over 2020, proving that investors’ predictions of improved deal-making in 2021 came to fruition.” In order to gain a competitive edge in this market, PE firms must look for a holistic solution that automates workflows and accelerates the deal processes, enables collaboration across teams, deepens relationships, increases employee productivity, and most importantly harnesses the power of data-driven decision making through the unification of disparate data sources/platforms.

Getting ahead in the race to close deals with improved agility and stealth just got easier through our innovative and automated solutions built on Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (referred to as FSC henceforth). This article illustrates how some of the key PE firm functions can greatly benefit from FSC’s capabilities complemented by our expertise at Cloud Peritus (CP).

Investor Relations & Fundraising

Whether the goal of the investor relationship team is to tap into new investors or to strengthen existing relationships, implementing Salesforce’s FSC will help nurture and deepen relationships through the actionable relationship center(ARC). The data sourced from market leaders such as Equilar, Preqin, etc. greatly helps in driving relationship intelligence. Relationship tagging, strength and the best path for reaching out to key investors can be leveraged to drive digital engagement and outreach. The communication & correspondence between the PE firms and their investors are tracked in one place creating a seamless Investor 360° view. Additionally, this data can be used to drive workflows and actions to automate meaningful and important actions. Campaign management for Fundraising is another key feature that FSC offers - making the outreach through tailored marketing journeys easy and greatly improves investor engagement. A centralized platform to view, track and report on the various stages of the campaign eliminates the need for manual data stewardship and improves transparency across the various teams.

Pipeline & Deal Management 

The deal team at PE firms can easily work on their pipeline, forecast accurately, and manage the velocity of deals across industries/portfolios. Deal origination platforms such as Pitchbook and Preqin can be seamlessly integrated with FSC and automatically sync companies and contacts based on criteria. Deal stages, deal workflows, communication & correspondence, relationship intelligence, due diligence workflows, and generation of targeted buyer lists that align with both the fund and firm’s goals are some of the key capabilities that are highly customizable and automated using FSC. Due diligence process - which is often the most crucial step in deal management - can now be worked upon and easily accessible to the LPs and related teams. Additionally, the due diligence process and collection of data can be standardized which greatly accelerates the process. Referral management allows tracking and crediting third parties & intermediaries submitting deals.

Tracking Interactions 

Interactions are vital to every PE firm. FSC capabilities like interaction summaries, interest tagging, and compliance-driven data access (deals, deal participants, contact information) give PE users the ability to bring all keynotes from meetings related to the target list, investors, contacts, deals and more eliminating and/or alleviating painstaking processes like swifting through notes across multiple applications, emails, shared drives, etc. Action Items and next steps defined within the interactions can be used to drive workflow and allow tracking and follow-up to closure. Key contacts can be derived from participant data to enhance relationship scoring, tagging, and strength. Confidentiality of the interactions allows control of access to interactions within the organization. Since the interaction summaries can be tied to any related record, key meeting notes can be related to multiple pertaining records within Salesforce. The multi-object/record tagging and roll-ups can be especially beneficial in providing the 360° view of assets (current and potential), driving relationship intelligence (Who knows who), and aiding/simplifying task & event management with automation.

Communication & Correspondence 

All digital communication and correspondence, regardless of the channel, can be integrated into FSC, allowing users across functions to access rich digital engagement data. Communication preference management will allow the PEs to reach out to the Investors, Targeted Buyer list, third parties, key contacts, etc. using their preferred communication channel which improves their overall response rate. Setting up an automated cadence based on actions can greatly help standardize internal workflows. Communication templates can also significantly increase the productivity of the PE team members. Key documents sent and received will now be available at the firms’ fingertips and related to the appropriate companies, contacts, third parties, or investors.

Portfolio Monitoring and Reporting  

Collecting and monitoring key data from portfolio companies can be extremely challenging and cumbersome. The portfolio companies can easily upload relevant financial and other key metrics in a secure manner empowering the PEs to be able to run reports and subscribe to dashboards for monitoring the performance - on a single platform. Investors, LPs, OPs, Fund Managers, and company executives can all refer to dashboards tailored to their interests - instead of rummaging through multiple Excel sheets, executive readouts and/or other reporting tools. Additionally, the collaboration between the PE firm and the portfolio companies is easier and organized through our solution. Portfolio companies often go through governance restructuring upon being acquired by the PE firms. Such personnel changes require a diligent and time-consuming vetting process. Equilar’s ExecAtlas simplifies decision-making by providing two very valuable signals: 

1. Vested Equity holdings by senior executives in a company
2. Personnel transitions within an organization

Investor and Portfolio Company Onboarding 

Dealing with indefinite timelines during the onboarding process is often an issue PE firms face - especially in scenarios where the KYC/due diligence of the investors and portfolio companies is handled by service partners rather than a dedicated in-house team, which is often the case. Document exchange and archiving is an overhead to the PE team amidst other pivotal tasks and may lead to errors due to long email/communication trails. Standardized, automated/guided digital onboarding (account setup in CRM) & completion of all the necessary legal paperwork via FSC’s customizable and configurable workflows provide a charming solution for both PE firms and new investors/portfolio companies. Communication between both parties for the completion of the key onboarding milestones is easily accomplished using case management.

Salesforce’s FSC in combination with CP’s solution accelerators and ‘Art of the possible’ delivery methodology is a perfect recipe to digitally transform PE firms and lessen the implementation time & cost ~ 30% or more.

To learn more about our solutions and offerings please reach out to info@cloudperitus.com.