Wealthbox CRM, a web-based customer relations management company, believes it has the tools to save financial advisors precious time.

“CRM in the wealth sector has been overly complex, and there’s money to be made around that complexity,” Wealthbox CEO John Rourke said in an interview with Bank Innovation. “From CRM classroom and software training to CRM consultants, administrators and developers, it’s turned into what I call the CRM industrial complex.”

Rourke believes financial advisors take criticism for not being technologically savvy, but the real fault lies in the outdated and clunky software. Crucial to Wealthbox’s mission to help overhaul wealth management tech is integrating with other financial service software companies.

On Monday, Wealthbox announced it was integrating its CRM technology with SS&C’s Black Diamond wealth platform. Wealth advisors can now access customer account information stored on Black Diamond while operating in Wealthbox.

The goal is to save advisors time by having the wealth platform and the CRM technology all in one place. In theory, this extra time could make financial advisors more accessible to their clients. Wealthbox already has integrated with TD Ameritrade’s Veo One and Fidelity’s Wealthscape Integration Xchange.

It’s unclear, however, just how useful these integrations are when it comes to saving registered investment advisors (RIAs) time.

“I love that more software companies are tailoring their offerings to our industry, but I do wish they would spend less time integrating and more time developing the tools we actually need,” said Taylor Kovar, CEO at boutique wealth management firm Kovar Capital, in a message to Bank Innovation. “My experiences with most of these integrations is that they are mainly a marketing ploy to show how forward-thinking the software is and not a true help to the advisors.”

Kovar has used Wealthbox, Redfin and several other software platforms. He said the integrations allow advisors the ability to see some client data from the CRM platform, but not enough to stay in one place the whole time. It does save him a few minutes, but he calls the technology “underwhelming at best.”

Rourke noted there are different types of integrations, but they tend to improve with upgrades over time. He cited Wealthbox and TD Ameritrade’s Veo One as an example. In December, Wealthbox announced the ability to pre-fill information from Wealthbox into Veo One to open new accounts. The original integration, however, occurred in January 2018.

Wealthbox has RIA clients at firms such as FormulaFolios and STA Wealth Management. In 2017, Investopedia named Wealthbox one of the top CRM tools for financial advisors and cited its social media tracking feature. The company will continue to look for chances to integrate. 

“It’s about time, and I say that as a double entendre,” said Steve Carroll, senior product manager at Wealthbox. “It’s about time that advisors have one easy-to-use tool with which they can integrate other services and complementary applications, and it’s about the time savings in using modern CRM technology like Wealthbox. CRM increasingly is being viewed as the hub for financial advisors.”