Transcript: Michael Johnson chats with Jason Rushforth from Pivotal.

This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/?p=526

Michael Johnson chats with Jason Rushforth from Pivotal.

Michael Johnson: This is PodTech.net. I'm Michael Johnson. Join me now as we talk with Jason Rushforth, general manager of financial services and health care vertical at Pivotal. Well, Jason welcome to the podcast.

Jason Rushforth: Well, thank you very much.

Michael Johnson: Tell me a little bit about Pivotal Corporation. What do you do there?

Jason Rushforth: Perfect. Well Pivotal is a leading provider of customer relationship management or more commonly know as CRM Software. We're based out of Vancouver, British Columbia and we really help organizations across a variety of different vertical markets realize how they can better interact with both their internal employees, their prospects and their customers. We really enable and automate areas around sales, marketing and client service and Pivotal focuses in on some core unique industries that help us differentiate from a CRM perspective. We've automated practices within the health care vertical, within home building, financial services and manufacturing. And obviously my focus as the general manager of financial services and health care is to focus on those two direct verticals.

Michael Johnson: Now are there any specific subverticals that you have for financial services in particular? Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Jason Rushforth: Absolutely. Financial services is obviously a very broad spectrum. When you say the word financial services lots of different lines of business can come to mind but one thing that Pivotal has done is we've looked at very niche markets or niche segments within the financial services market space and the areas that we like to focus in on is our investment management space, capital markets are both sales, research and training as well as investment banking, commercial banking and retail brokerage/wealth management. We offer one consolidated application that serves up all these lines of business so larger institutions that have both capital markets and investment management can take advantage of one application providing unique functionality across those different lines of business.

Michael Johnson: So tell me a little bit about, I've been reading up on you guys a little bit, tell me a little bit about your investment management solution and expand on that a little bit and how CRM can help with these types of firms, firms that work with that.

Jason Rushforth: One of the things that's really unique about the investment management spaces, its really broken into two succinctly different lines of business within investment management. You have mutual fund wholesaling and then you have institutional asset management. And each of those has different pain points respectively. So one of those things that Pivotal has done is we've looked at, from a institutional asset management perspective, how people in marketing, sales and client service need to internally interact and better communicate. We've also looked at how on the whole sale side, how inside and outside wholesalers can better work together. Once again very succinctly different lines of business and if we look for just a moment at the mutual fund wholesaling space one of the things that's very unique is just the data model or understanding that you've have brokers, brokers report to branches, branches roll up to firm level. We need to track all sales and redemption, expenses, client interaction at the broker level, we need to roll that up to the branch level and you need to have that rolled up to the firm level. But what is also interesting about the mutual fund wholesaling space is that traditional CRM is really defined in sales force automation, specifically around opportunity management, in the mutual fund wholesaling space there is no direct opportunity management. It's about managing and better understanding the relationships and the profitability with the brokers that the outside wholesalers do business with. So we provide tools that really allow the wholesalers to understand who their brokers are, down to compliance tracking around NASE regulations for gift giving. On the institutional side, institutions that manage pension funds for example have sales marketing clients services that has commonly before CRM poor interaction channels or collaboration between those groups. And Pivotal really looks at third party data as well when we look at this and then internal account portfolio information and when you take the whole broad spectrum inside the institutional asset management space we provide money market directories to allow firms to segment and better understand who their prospect base is, we provide best of breed sales force automation for the relationship managers to work through their sales process, understanding and managing all the complexities of the interrelationships and in the institutional management space, consultants are the prevalent provider of RFTs back to the institutional firms and they need to track all their interrelationships with their clients, prospects and consultants. From there, when they come to sold, it's passed back to the client services group for day to day operations and we provide a tool that really allows for one-stop shopping, so whether you're a portfolio manager, you're a client services representative, you're a relationship manager, you're a marketer or you're an executive within an institutional firm, when you use the Pivotal application and you open up a client record, not only can you see what money market directories is saying about that customer, we can also capture and understand what your backoff as portfolio information is about that customer so we can see their one year, three year and five year performance as well as any reports or any statements that have gone out to that particular client.

Michael Johnson: Well it sounds like Pivotal really covers a lot. How long has the company been around?

Jason Rushforth: Pivotal has been around for ten yours now. We have over two thousand customers across the globe and roughly fifteen percent of those customers are directly in the financial services vertical for us.

Michael Johnson: And if people want to find out a little bit more about Pivotal and your core product and some other information about the company; where can they go?

Jason Rushforth: They can go to www.pivotal.com and from there, there's great navigations to white papers, data sheets, online product demonstrations that they can have a look.

Michael Johnson: Well I've been speaking today with Jason Rushforth who is the general manager for financial services and health care at Pivotal, and its been great talking with you on the podcast today and finding out a little bit more about this company, that's kinda stealthy but seems to cover a lot.

Jason Rushforth: Excellent. Well thank you very much for your time today. Really appreciate it.