Salesforce.com Announces New Wealth Management Edition and On-Demand CRM Deployment at Merrill Lynch for 25,000 Users
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NEW YORK, Feb. 27: Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced Salesforce Wealth Management Edition, the next generation financial advisor desktop built for The Business Web. Salesforce.com is revolutionizing financial services applications by providing a new circle of success for customers: on-demand CRM applications, community and developer empowerment, the Apex platform, and the AppExchange directory and marketplace -- now with dozens of financial services applications. Industry leaders Cisco, Dell, Dow Jones and Thomson Financial are among those working with salesforce.com to define and deliver a new standard for the financial advisor desktop.
"Salesforce Wealth Management Edition changes the game for financial institutions," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Merrill Lynch is the showcase example of this new circle of success: on-demand applications, platform innovation, and leading industry partners via the AppExchange. In fact, more than 1,200 financial services companies are already using Salesforce as the on-demand standard to manage their business."
Salesforce.com and Industry Leaders Deliver a New Standard for Financial Advisors
Financial institutions are quickly moving towards adoption of cutting-edge technology from industry leaders such as Cisco, Dell, Dow Jones, salesforce.com and Thomson Financial. This new technology is based on open standards to accelerate implementation and integration, delivers innovation and leading usability for high adoption and ultimately enables financial institutions to provide better service to their clients. Salesforce.com is working with this coalition of industry leaders to define a vision of the new standard desktop for millions of financial advisors.
"Salesforce.com's success demonstrates how critical a 360 degree view of their clients is to financial services professionals," said Clare Hart, executive vice president, Dow Jones & Company and president, Enterprise Media Group. "Dow Jones knows that successful wealth management is contingent upon regular, meaningful communication between advisors and their clients. We look forward to working closely with salesforce.com to integrate Dow Jones Wealth Manager with salesforce.com's Wealth Management Edition and Apex platform to provide a powerful experience for financial advisors that leverages Dow Jones' client-loyalty building information and technology directly in their on-demand business applications."
"This new model represents a significant shift in financial services technology. It rivals past shifts such as the migration from mainframes to client server and creates entirely new business opportunities. At Thomson Financial, we see opportunities to migrate our business model and deliver new innovative solutions to our clients," said Matthew Burkley, President, Enterprise Solutions at Thomson Financial. "By partnering with salesforce.com, a leader in on-demand business services, we are helping our clients enhance both their efficiency and ability to drive better than market performance."
Salesforce Wealth Management Edition
Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will be the next generation desktop for financial advisors, discount brokers, private bankers and independents, built on the award-winning Salesforce CRM application and the Apex on-demand platform. Created with high user adoption in mind, Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will be an industry specific CRM application that gives advisors a 360 degree view of their clients and allows them to manage client data and information in one place. Additionally, the AppExchange partner eco-system offers wealth management and financial services mash-ups with more than two dozen pre-integrated partner applications that are available today. Features of Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will include:
o Client 360 -- Built by working with financial advisors, brokers, private
bankers, and independents, the application will include deep industry
profiling of clients and prospects, instant recognition of the next
interaction and last interaction, and a single view that pulls together
all related information about the client.
o Know Your Client -- Tracking "know your client" information in
Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will help financial advisors record
regulatory-mandated data in client records. It will also provide
workflow and approval management to assign ownership for "know your
client" activities to team members, establish required reviews, and
manage approvals.
o Client Team Calendaring -- This will be a key productivity enhancement
for client teams. In addition to capabilities found in common
calendaring applications, Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will
streamline the process of scheduling the internal advisor team and the
client, their spouse, attorney, and/or accountant.
o Client Action Plans -- Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will include
the capability for customers to define templates for creating and
assigning specific sets of tasks to teams based on certain events, such
as obtaining a new client or the service touch points for an existing
client for the year. Actions plans will provide the ability to delegate
activities to multiple owners and stagger timing to optimize the client
experience and team productivity. Users will be able to easily tailor
action plans for specific client households by changing timing, activity
owners, or required activities.
o Household Management -- Users will be able to provide household-centric
management by understanding the household profile, household members,
associated professionals, and all consolidated data of household members
in a single view.
Salesforce Wealth Management Edition Harnesses the Power of the Circle of Success
Salesforce.com is delivering a circle of success for financial services institutions: powerful and easy-to-use on-demand CRM applications that drive high user adoption rates; the IdeaExchange for community empowerment; the Apex Developer Network providing the tools and resources for developer innovation; the Apex platform, which enables IT success by quickly and easily addressing customization and integration needs; and the freedom of choice provided by the AppExchange marketplace and directory, featuring dozens of pre-integrated financial services partner applications to build out successful customer implementations. This new model is replacing traditional financial systems that have been hard to use, do not offer quality CRM features and functions, and are difficult to integrate with external data and systems.
Salesforce Wealth Management Edition showcases this circle of success at work by adding rich wealth management capabilities to the award-winning Salesforce CRM application and incorporating the best ideas and innovations from the customer and developer community for industry best practices. Salesforce Wealth Management leverages the power of the Apex platform to customize and embed additional financial services applications, track compliance through approval workflows, and integrate additional data and information through the Apex API. Salesforce Wealth Management Edition also harnesses the AppExchange and salesforce.com's open ecosystem for industry- leading partner technology.
IdeaExchange - New Category for Wealth Management Community Ideas
IdeaExchange (http://ideas.salesforce.com/) is a forum where users can comment on new product features, promote favorite enhancements, and interact with salesforce.com product managers who participate in the discussion forums. As part of ongoing efforts to continually create a dialog with the community, salesforce.com is launching a new category on the IdeaExchange to provide an open and direct channel of communication for customers in the wealth management market.
Apex Developer Network - Resources and Tools to Build Financial Services Applications
As these ideas inspire as the developer community to create the next salesforce.com, the Apex Developer Network (http://developer.salesforce.com/) provides the community, tools and resources to let developers use the Apex programming language as well as other languages and toolkits to build new applications for the AppExchange. Now any developer in the world -- with access to just a Web browser and Internet connection -- can harness the power of the world's most popular multi-tenant platform to create new applications and mashups from scratch.
Apex Platform to Customize and Integrate Data and Applications
Apex is the on-demand platform for the next generation of business applications. Apex reinvents traditional customization and integration and enables a whole new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond CRM. All Apex components and applications can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, enabling all the innovation that Apex unleashes to benefit the entire on- demand community.
AppExchange Features More than Two Dozen Financial Services Partner Applications
Financial services customers now have a wealth of choices to extend the success they have generated with salesforce.com's on-demand business applications with new partner solutions available on the AppExchange for Brokerage, Capital Markets, Insurance, Mortgage, Retail Banking, Wealth Management and more. These new partner solutions extend the powerful features, quick deployment, lower overall costs and other benefits of multi-tenant on-demand business applications to customers and prospects in the financial services industry. The AppExchange features more than two dozen financial services partner solutions built using salesforce.com's Apex on-demand platform.
Fourteen industry-leading financial services partners participated in salesforce.com's Financial Services event today, including: BlueWolf, Cisco, Dell, Deloitte, Dow Jones, E*Assist, Finaplex, Finetix, Navatar Group, OKERE, Pyxis Mobile, Siemens, StraightThrough, and Thomson Financial.
More than 200,000 test drives and more than 20,000 application installs at more than 8,000 customers have taken place of the more than 520 applications that are now available on the salesforce.com AppExchange, the world's first on-demand directory, found at salesforce.com/appexchange .
First in a Series of Financial Services Editions
Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will be the first in a series of financial services applications from salesforce.com, which is currently scheduled to include Salesforce Banking Edition, Salesforce Capital Markets Edition, Salesforce Insurance Edition and Salesforce Mortgage Edition. These forthcoming financial services editions will extend the benefits and success of the on-demand model to all areas of the financial services industry.
Pricing and Availability
In addition to the features mentioned above, Salesforce Wealth Management Edition will include all the award-winning CRM features and functionality of Unlimited Edition, including custom tabs, custom objects and AppExchange applications, Salesforce Sandbox, Apex Mobile and Premium Support and Administration. Salesforce Wealth Management Edition is currently scheduled to be available in calendar Q3 2007. Salesforce Wealth Management Edition is currently scheduled to cost $500 per user per month.
The Apex on-demand platform is generally available today. The Apex programming language is available today for developer preview, and is currently scheduled to be available in beta to salesforce.com customers later this year.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. Apex, the world's first on-demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. All Apex components and applications can be easily shared, exchanged and installed via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.
As of January 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 29,800 customers and approximately 646,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis Budget Group, Inc, Dow Jones, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Source: salesforce.com, Inc.
CONTACT:
Gordon Evans
+1-415-536-7608
gevans@salesforce.com
Web site: http://www.salesforce.com/
