BST Awards 2019: Best buy-side CRM platform—Tier1 Financial Solutions

Toronto- and New York-based Tier1 Financial Solutions follows up its success in this category in last year’s BST Awards by winning it again, thanks to its Tier1 CRM platform.   

Much of the firm’s buy-side appeal can be attributed to regulatory changes introduced in the wake of Mifid II, which, according to Doug Christensen, vice president of strategy at Tier1 Financial Solutions, is driving asset managers to exert more control around their engagement with their various sell-side providers. “That means creating much more transparency, using technology to track their interactions and to manage more of their services in-house as they think about the cost implications resulting from regulatory changes,” he explains.

According to Christensen, the sell side is also undergoing something of a transformation, particularly in the small- and mid-cap research market, resulting in buy-side firms managing services in-house that traditionally would have been sourced from the sell side. “That’s having a dual impact,” he says. “It saves them money, but it also preserves the value of that service by bringing the resources in-house to support their portfolio managers.”

Tier1 has a pair of buy-side-focused offerings specifically designed to allow firms to manage their communications around corporate access, event management and client engagement as efficiently and transparently as possible. “We have a full suite of tools that allow the buy side to manage their engagement with their providers—we have a CRM platform, but we also have an event calendar that allows them to manage and originate all of their corporate access events in-house,” Christensen says. “We give them the ability to still consume from the sell side without that interaction going away altogether. They are reducing their reliance on the sell side, but they are increasingly creating their own conferences and events with the corporates to support their portfolio managers. That is our differentiator—they can do it in real time, as opposed to once a quarter, post-event or post interaction,” he says.