BST Awards 2022: Best buy-side CRM (customer relationship management) platform—Backstop Solutions Group

Overview

The Backstop CRM Platform is purpose-built for the institutional and alternative investment industries and features a tailored entity structure and reporting and relationship engines. The platform comprises three main components/functions: capital raising management, relationship management, and communication management. It supports fundraising and marketing and provides buy-side firms with real-time data and analytics that help them prioritize opportunities and drive efficiencies.

What problem does it address?  

Backstop’s CRM platform is designed to address the issues of time management and inefficient workflows. It is purpose-built for the needs of the alternative investment management industry and supports a range of functions from capital-raising to investor relations management and communications.

Secret sauce 

Backstop sees its relationship and reporting capabilities, the configurability of the platform, and emphasis on security as its key differentiators. It integrates research providers, offering clients additional data and dashboard visualizations to surface insights, while its net client retention rate is 105%. 

Recent milestones

• Release of the Backstop Mobile 2.0 app where users can add recent activities; map contact locations; view product, vehicle, account and holdings data; and dictate meetings/call notes with voice-to-text
• Launch of Capital Raising Dashboard, which simplifies tracking and managing activities, allowing business development teams to see contacts and real-time insights into pipelines and manage interest levels, investor types, and investment probabilities
• Innovation—more than 60% of Backstop’s gross revenues are re-invested into the platform

Future objectives 

• The launch of Backstop Home Base, designed to surface insights across the platform through configurable widgets
• Backstop will continue to add partners and integrations to Backstop Integrator, which has more than 1,000 pre-built connectors to enhance users’ abilities to surface data insights from a single source.
• The firm has invested in senior hires across the Asia-Pacific region.

Why they won

Backstop Solutions Group wins the best CRM platform category in this year’s BST Awards thanks to its Backstop CRM Platform, designed to support alternative asset managers’ capital raising management, relationship management and communication management functions. As a business function, CRM tends not to receive the plaudits it deserves, given the critical, enabling role CRM platforms play in maintaining firms’ internal and external relationships, not to mention their ability to store, surface and distribute client information to the pertinent people across the business. Receiving recognition like this goes some way to rectifying the situation.