BUY-SIDE TECHNOLOGY AWARDS: Best buy-side CRM product: Digiterre

It’s fair to say that the buy side has never been faced with a more difficult operating environment than what exists now, especially when it comes to meeting investors’ expectations, and perhaps more crucially, understanding their often diverse needs and requirements. Digiterre’s dCRM platform is designed to do exactly that—in fact, it does it so efficiently that our panelists had little trouble separating dCRM from its competitors in this new category for 2010.

When it comes to customer relationship management (CRM) requirements, the investment management industry is very different from most others: Whereas generic CRM systems usually focus on sales force automation and are typically used by large sales teams with high-touch/low-value communications, buy-side firms tend to focus on fewer, more complex relationships. Buy-side CRM functions are, therefore, carried out by relatively small, specialized marketing and investor relations teams, who collaborate with investment managers to attract and retain capital, which, in this current environment, can often determine a fund’s overall success or failure.

Digiterre’s dCRM offering includes: investor holdings management—dCRM manages transactional information allowing users to see investor and fund holdings at a glance, and provides a set of sophisticated reports such as performance and liquidity; automated investor communications—dCRM provides quick and easy means of reporting to investors en masse, including email personalization, PDF watermarking, template production, and workflows for automatically creating communications; efficient operation—dCRM includes a set of more than 50 workflows, including automated notifications, task creation and alerts out of the box; desktop integration—dCRM, built on the Microsoft Dynamics framework, integrates with Outlook and other Microsoft Office applications. —VBA

JUDGE'S COMMENT
There were a number of good contenders in this category, but Digiterre has the best combination of mature functionality as well as innovative and progressive software.

DIGITERRE REACTION
“We are clearly excited to have won this award as it is a testament to the quality of our product, people and customers. As a company we had expertise in both customer relationship management (CRM) and in investment management and we brought these two ‘specialisms’ together in building dCRM as a relationship management system to truly empower the buy side. As important as the software itself, is the level of service we provide our customers and in this respect I believe we are second to none. The award is also an endorsement of our vision: to deliver a solution that is highly relevant to investment managers, primarily in attracting and retaining profitable investors, but increasingly in operating a compliant and efficient business.”
—Ian Murrin, CEO and founder, Digiterre