Monday, November 17, 2014

SharePoint Development for Investment Consultants

How SharePoint Can Help Investment Consultants.

Investment Consultant Roles

Investment consultants formulate strategies and guide investors to make correct long-term and short-term investments. They manage and constantly monitor clients' portfolios to meet desired results. Their aim is to preserve and grow clients' investment/asset over the long term and keep them abreast of the latest financial products. Further, they have to manage a large pool of documents/artifacts and seamlessly mentor their clients over a long period of time.

Role of IT and Challenges (SharePoint Helps fill these gaps)

With a dynamic economic landscape, Investment experts face a lot of challenges before them - both at macro and micro level. They need to survey possession distribution more often because of the unpredictable and dynamic market swings. They need to evaluate the magnitude of losses and continually track macroeconomic variables. Their current innovation set up is inadequate in more ways than one to handle these intricacies.

Internally, they have to maintain a large pool of information, archives and artifacts pertaining to each of their clients and also interact with them to meet their monetary objectives. At present clients require personalized and focused services from these investment consultants. An elevated turnaround time in responding to customers' queries might bring about competitor switch and in nonappearance of synergistic correspondence might hamper connection with clients.

Apart from the above challenges there are several in-house challenges that linger in current investment consulting firms:

  • Investment Research
  • Investment product evaluation and performance measurement
  • Customer relationship management
  • Lack of Value added services offered to clients
  • Usage of Obsolete/Legacy Systems to manage clients data
  • Unstructured Data Management
  • Downgraded system performance
  • Single Point Access to Data
  • Low collaboration with clients

How a SharePoint Set-up helps?

A SharePoint set-up renders a collaborative platform in the form of Intranet portal for investment consultants to share information related to clients' activities, better interact and engage with clients, enable value added services by providing customers with research reports, whitepapers etc.

It can build a central repository of data and can allow single point access to fetch relevant documents pertaining to a specific clients' portfolio and prevent the system from any unauthorized access. Apart from these SharePoint 2010 offers a host of other features to manage document types, retention policies etc. Investment consultants can also utilize other SharePoint features like document versioning, task listing etc. to improve task visibility, employees' collaboration, configuring indexing services, building custom search service for faster and accurate search results.

SharePoint Integration

SharePoint Consultants can help integrate existing CRM with SharePoint to overcome native functionality limitations of CRM by creating a central repository of data. They can facilitate integration of SharePoint with other in-house customer LOB application used to generate research col-laterals.

SharePoint integration enables consultants to have a consolidated view of data residing systems to improve TAT and user experience.

SharePoint Portal, Development & Customization

Apart from host of in-built features, SharePoint can also be customized and developed according to clients' requirement. SharePoint Custom Scripts can help monitor database growth and compartmentalize database to keep system performance optimal. It can also help in migrating obsolete clients data from legacy systems to SharePoint for better exception handling and control. SharePoint can also be developed using custom codes for data clean up and maintenance to reduced maintenance overheads.

How to choose a SharePoint consultant for your organisation?

It is important to seek external SharePoint consultants' assistance before implementing SharePoint solutions for your organisation. Full scale implementation of SharePoint solutions requires in-depth business domain experience. Hence before you select a SharePoint consultant for your business, it is important to know whether the consulting company has prior knowledge and experience in the same domain.Besides, you should also take into account factors like projects handled by them, location of your consultant, years of experience in the field, pricing per hour, reputation in the market etc. If you are planning to outsource SharePoint consulting to get cost advantage you should take into account the location of your SharePoint consulting firm. For most of the companies situated in USA, UK or Europe, the best choice as a country is India due favored factors of IT policies, infrastructure, English language proficiency, time zone difference and a reputation of global leader in IT outsourcing landscape.

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