Buy-Side Technology Awards 2013: Best Buy-Side CRM Product—Digiterre

The heart of it is still dCRM, which supports all key marketing and investor-relations functions and enables firms to track all activities relating to contacts, including investors and potential investors, counterparties, suppliers and partners. Firms can also track, manage and report on potential investments, allowing them to create investment reports more easily. Improved reporting and charts can be displayed through configurable dashboards. Communica retains tight integration with Microsoft Outlook, as it was built using Microsoft CRM 2011 technology.

But the reason Digiterre came out ahead is its new integrated modules. Fund Flows, according to Digiterre, has created the greatest resonance, allowing users to see the current valuation of each investor’s holdings as well as their transaction history, and view holdings by strategy, fund, and share-class level. Out-of-the-box reports and dashboards cover fund liquidity and holdings. Fund Flows data can also be used for liquidity profiling and managing fees and rebates distribution to the sales teams and third-party marketers.

“This module enables the import of data from a third-party fund administrator including net-asset values (NAVs), cleared transactions, forward transactions, lot holdings, and foreign-exchange (FX) rates,” says Ian Murrin, Digiterre CEO. “Relevant data is then mapped to the underlying investor, allowing for enhanced reporting on inflows/outflows, top investors by fund, investor holdings, and assets under management at the share class, fund and strategy levels.”

Tracker enables users to track email and attachment opens, create HTML email templates, personalize content, customize watermarks on PDFs to prevent document distribution, and preview and send test campaigns. The Connect extranet module allows firms to distribute fund reports and fund information, and lets them display interactive charting of fund performance, on a secure extranet, and control what each investor can see. The Mobile module brings data access and editing ability onto mobile devices even when offline, while the cloud version of Communica is hosted on Amazon Web Services, and is often used by smaller buy-side shops because of its monthly pay model.

Digiterre Reaction:
“Winning this award means a lot to me and to the whole team at Digiterre. We have worked incredibly hard and have invested very heavily over the last two years to re-engineer all aspects of our product set, with a view to making the Communica platform the very best enhanced CRM product available to managers, platforms and service providers. Winning the best CRM product/service from Buy-Side Technology is another great accolade for the Communica platform team. I would like to thank all of our clients and partners for their support in making this a great year for Digiterre and our Communica platform.”
—Ian Murrin, CEO and founder, Digiterre