How Are You Handling the RIA Channel?

RIA channel touchpoints

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the CRM Forum, a meeting put on by On Course Advisors. It was a great opportunity to learn from and engage with our clients and other industry-leading firms and partners. The cool thing about this forum is that it’s similar to the SalesPage client community in the sense that it focuses on industry-specific challenges, and participants collaborate on how to solve them. One of the leading topics at this forum was how firms manage the RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) channel. As our industry changes and the RIA space continues to grow, we feel that it is imperative to work with our clients to provide the tools required to effectively target RIAs.

How the industry manages RIAs

It was interesting to hear the different ways in which asset managers are tackling this part of the market. From firm to firm, there were some differences in how they were:

  • Channelizing RIAs
  • Assigning resources to cover the RIA channel
  • Compensating on business that comes from the RIA channel
  • Communicating with RIAs.

Those differences, coupled with the entrepreneurial spirit of RIAs and the fact that the majority have multiple clearing relationships, require us to differentiate how we manage RIA relationships.

How SalesPage clients manage RIAs

I am proud that SalesPage has been on the leading edge of helping our clients address the RIA channel. In 2014, we worked with the SalesPage client community to develop enhanced RIA channel management, which helps our clients address these unique challenges. This functionality in SalesPage products includes the ability to:

  • Differentiate profiles between traditional reps and RIAs
  • Leverage SalesPage Teams functionality to manage RIAs
  • Manage two-tier RIAs within the traditional three-tier (Firm/Office/Rep) hierarchy
  • Handle multiple clearing relationships for each rep.

Other challenges SalesPage is tackling

Our SalesPage philosophy is to partner with our client community to address challenges with industry-leading solutions. Similar to the way in which we worked with our clients to tackle the RIA challenge, SalesPage is taking on other industry challenges, too. Some of these include handling: dual-registered reps (DRRs); separately managed accounts (SMAs); emerging products like active exchange-traded funds (ETFs); and the hurdle of incorporating “big data” into sales and marketing efforts. With our strategic relationships with our clients and our unparalleled industry expertise, SalesPage is able to help our clients be first-to-market with solutions for many of the industry’s existing and emerging challenges.

To learn more about how SalesPage helps our clients address the RIA channel or other industry challenges, please feel free to contact me or any other SalesPage team member.

HT to Tony and his team at On Course for putting on a great event.