Cambridge Investment Research, Inc.
About Client
Cambridge Investment Research, Inc. is an internally controlled financial solutions firm dedicated to serving independent financial advisors and their clients. Cambridge offers a flexible range of solutions in the areas of advice, growth, technology, independence, and more. Cambridge is guided by its core values of integrity, commitment, flexibility, and kindness. It is a formula for success that has been honed over 40 years¹ with exceptional results.
The Cambridge team includes a great mix of innovators, problem solvers, and game changers. They are fiercely independent and are laser focused on doing what is right for the Financial Professionals that work with them, their associates, and the communities that they serve.
Challenges
Key Highlights:
- Goal: Reimagine the financial professional experience.
- Challenge: Integrate data from multiple sources into a unified platform.
- Solution: A seamless, time-saving tool to enhance client service and operational efficiency.
The Cambridge executive team was looking to reimagine the financial professional experience. They asked themselves how they could break through the traditional barriers which have prevented wealth management firms from delivering a seamless Financial Professional experience. This experience would need to bring together data from disparate sources including financial planning, CRM, trading, client reporting and others.
Cambridge’s Financial Professionals were looking to solve a simple, unmet need: How can I access all my client data in one view in a way that will help me run my business efficiently and serve my clients more effectively? The 5,000+ Cambridge Financial Professionals and their support staff were looking for a solution that saved time and enabled them to provide greater focus on the business of serving their clients.
Approach
The Cambridge and Invent® teams collaborated to define the strategy for the desired experience that the Cambridge Financial Professionals were looking for.
Professional experience took time and required the input of many people as well as a relentless desire amongst everyone to deliver meaningful change.
The execution of this meaningful change was a collaborative effort between the Cambridge and Invent® teams.
Invent® played a critical role by providing:
- Technical leadership to coordinate development,
- Digital Advisor Portal — an interface for managing client data,
- A core set of wealth management data sets.
- A purpose-built Data Lake and digital warehouse to power advanced data analytics.
These components became the foundation for the latest evolution of CLIC®, Cambridge’s comprehensive online business environment.
Key steps included:
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Integration of Data Sources:
The initial solution incorporated data from Pershing, Fidelity, SEI, Schwab, and other institutions,
= totaling over 40 data sources.
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Normalization of Data:
These diverse data sources were normalized into a single source of truth for Households, Clients, and Accounts.
Result
What Clients Are Saying
We have always appreciated the partnership with Invent and their innovative approach. The Invent® team is always willing to do something different than what others are doing now. The Invent platform will allow us to continue to build out business analytics for our Financial Professionals to make better business decisions and serve their clients today and in the future.
We continue to be excited to work with Oleg and the Invent Elite team as they join us in delivering digital technology leadership and innovative systems architecture to our independent Financial Professionals and their clients.
As a Financial Professional, being able to access my information in a single location that brings together both data that Cambridge maintains and that comes from Albridge saves me hours instead of having to view and export details in multiple systems.
The fact that I can see my clients, their assets under advisement, and where I have allocated their money helps me make decisions on my interactions with clients and how I prioritize their needs.
The household breakdown on the CLIC Dashboard is very cool. I can quickly understand how many members make up that household, who they are, and the total number of accounts with asset breakdown. These types of widgets and report breakdowns are extremely helpful in my client meetings.
The Global Search feature on the CLIC Dashboard allows me to drill down on specific information that I need on my client and their accounts to better service them. This is on par with what I can get in my connection with Redtail, but also contains more details that Cambridge maintains all combined in one view.
As a Cambridge home office user of the CLIC Dashboard, I gain insights about our Financial Professionals and how they are performing. This insight provides our teams with talking points and offers guidance to our Financial Professionals regarding how to grow their business.
