Practifi with Adrian Johnstone | E265
Purpose building an advisor centric CRM.
In today's episode of Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Adrian Johnstone, Co-founder, and President of Practifi. Practifi is an advisor centric CRM that was developed on the Salesforce platform but is not Salesforce itself and has made a name for itself in terms of leveraging the advantage to build better automation workflows and tools for advisors.
Episode Highlights
0.44: Adrian explains that they use the term performance optimization platform in Practifi. They use salesforce as the chassis, but they are actually a product sitting on top and none of the nasty overlay stuff.
2.37: Adrian says that they started a long way away down in the most regulated market in the world and they really looked at the fact that advisors were typically using outmoded technology and most of the tools that are available only thought about the advisor. They didn't think about the other roles in the organization.
6.07: Adrian explains that their system is designed to provide the answers to questions you are not yet thinking like, who do I need to call, what do I need to call them about, what might I have missed from a compliance perspective and serve that information up to the right person at the right time.
7.37: When we think about the vertical offerings of large providers, we think about the secrets in the name and it's for role of financial services whether you are a bank or you are an advisor, says Adrian.
8.45: There are 25 or 27 standard workflows to ship out-of-the-box and Adrian has refined those and continue to refine those with their clients to how does this work and what does that look like.
9.20: Adrian told someone that they need to do something along the way is one thing, but what they have done is embed things like the data capture and data transfer within the workflow itself.
13.44: Many people don't realize that Salesforce and Microsoft are in pretty much every business where Salesforce exists, but they don't necessarily play great together on their own.
14.22: Adrian explains how they are going to be doing work more deeply with SharePoint and working their way through that Microsoft Stack so that one can genuinely have that truly integrated experience with Salesforce and can also feel a part of the Microsoft experience.
17.19: Adrian shares how they have built very specific integrations at an industry level, and they will continue to do that as well.
19.20: Adrian says that they also see newer firms coming into the market who look at integrating the Salesforce and what they find is that they are going to integrate to something that they know everyone has customized because there are a very few standard Salesforce instances out there.
21.58: Anyone who's going to really exercise the technology, then we are a great solution because you don't lose any of the flexibility. You just gain such a strong starting position, says Adrian.
24.21: As per Jason building off the platform Adrian build off and having that early-stage advantage and all the integrations already off the shelf or integrations that people come with, he sees that as a huge strategic advantage in Adrian's ability to move on all this.
25.54: The challenge in company is being able to meet the expectations of our clients in how quickly we can get the things that we all want to get done. Delivering on the promise is the biggest challenge, says Adrian.
3 Key Points
Practifi is designed to cater for a multifamily office with complex relationship trees, many to many kinds of structures within there, as well as managing all of your other relationships.
Adrian explains how they got away from standard stuff available on salesforce and built what Practifi Propel, which is an entire analytics suite and gives users the comprehensive time series data that one can really look at across the business.
Adrian shares how he wants to create a more unified experience between the Salesforce and Microsoft Stacks because they know the Office 365 world is ubiquitous and they want to make that as seamless as possible.
Tweetable Quotes
"Having something purposely built versus generic from day one is a big advantage for anyone starting off from day one." - Jason
"There is an advantage to having a specifically the way you want, but at the same time there is a burden, and the burden of most people are not going to want to retake." – Jason
"Practifi is not trying to be the solution to the retail banker. It's a solution to the wealth to the financial intermediaries." – Adrian
"As the underlying platform changes, you are forced into reinvesting in building because it doesn't stand still and so you can't." – Adrian
"It's not trivial exercise to go and build a bidirectional API integration to someone else who is then going to go and change their platform and you have to rebuild it." - Adrian
"I wish to change the expectations of people within the industry around technology and I want them to understand that it's not magic." - Adrian
Resources Mentioned
Facebook – Jason Pereira's Facebook
LinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedIn
Woodgate.com – Sponsor