Scotia Capital Ties Events to Closer Customer Relations

For sell-side organizations, good customer relations are the key to revenue generation. But providing high-quality customer service means first knowing what the client wants, and then being proactive in meeting its demands. So when Scotia Capital wanted to upgrade its legacy customer relationship management capabilities it turned to Salentica Systems, a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner that has built a range of value-added tools as extensions to the Microsoft CRM.

The overarching theme behind the system implementation is improved communication between the firm’s institutional research, sales and trading teams and the client organizations they service, says Janet McGee, director of Institutional Equities at Scotia Capital. “We’re a large organization, and the key was to have an accurate client database, so that we are making efficient use of our research analysts’ and our institutional sales and trading people’s time, and to have access to that information.”

A core functionality, and Salentica’s specialty, is its Event Manager component. Scotia’s Institutional Equities group services its clients by, for example, providing research, inviting the portfolio managers to conferences where they can obtain trading ideas, and setting up one-on-one meetings between the portfolio managers and executives of the companies in which they might invest. In this way, the equities team provides added value to their institutional investor clients. In return that drives Scotia’s revenue, since the institutional managers will (hopefully) allocate to Scotia their trades for execution.

“An institutional manager can trade with anybody, but they trade with certain people because those firms deliver value, which could be research, or conferences and analyst meetings,” notes Bill Rourke, president of Salentica. “So being able to manage that process affects the trading value.”

And with the Event Manager, Scotia’s institutional sales staff and equity research analysts – who are spread across Canada and the United States as well as in London – can work together to keep track of and manage the various conferences, events and analyst sessions that take place in multiple cities with clients that are spread around the world. “It tracks everything that is going on,” says Rourke. “For example, it can show a sales trader who may be in Vancouver what sessions are coming up in Montreal for the clients that are based there.”

Therefore, the event management piece allows users to take ownership of the events and the client relationships, notes McGee: “They can schedule blocks of meetings, set up individual meetings, and so everybody is kept aware.”

Scotia is tapping a number of other Salentica capabilities too. One is its call reports, which track telephone conversations and voicemails between Scotia employees and their institutional manager clients. So when, for example, an analyst speaks with a client, an institutional sales person can choose to receive an automatic notice about the meeting. This is a useful communication tool, explains McGee.

“We also now have great management reporting to track which clients we have seen and which corporate management teams we have brought through,” McGee adds. “It is very valuable in terms of gathering information on our activities over whatever period of time we decide to look at. That is indispensable for our marketing efforts, and for analysts’ one-on-one and group meetings, and for the corporate management teams we bring through for the one-on-ones and group meetings.”

Another aspect Scotia needs to track is what companies and sectors the portfolio managers are interested in, so they know what research to send out, notes Rourke. That is then distributed through a separate system.

There is also a compliance angle. For example, all Scotia’s know-your-client (KYC) documentation is housed and tracked in the system.

Overall then, the Salentica system is enabling Scotia to get “a handle on our clients and know them better, which can translate into profitability,” says McGee.

As for its plans going forward, Scotia intends to upgrade from its current use of version 3.0 of the system to version 4.0 “in the near future,” says senior manager Bettina Wadehn, who was in charge of Scotia’s original system implementation. Scotia also would like to further integrate the system with some of its other in-house platforms, such as its publishing systems, she adds.

Another area of tentative interest that has been discussed would be potentially to extend use of the system across Scotia’s other product silos. “It would help to understand the relationships across the firm with client organizations, and there is definitely interest, specifically in foreign exchange and fixed income,” notes McGee.

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