Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced that Standard Life Bank has joined the more than 1,200 financial services companies that have standardized on Salesforce for Financial Services.
This leading retail bank is using the multi-tenant Salesforce solution to create a single, unified profile of UK financial intermediaries within its retail banking business. As a result, the company is increasing intermediary visibility, sales productivity and effectiveness, and delivering a more consistent and rewarding service experience, while simultaneously sharing information across the greater Standard Life Group business units. Based on this success, other parts of the Standard Life Group, including Assurance, Investments and Healthcare are now implementing Salesforce for Financial Services.
Standard Life is one of the 32,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2007. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.
"We concluded from our extensive feasibility studies that the Salesforce system was easiest to adopt and offered the greatest degree of flexibility and customization capabilities," said Jackie Moran, head of sales, Standard Life Bank. "Since going live, we've received excellent feedback from our sales team. The Salesforce system's design is very similar to that of consumer websites, such as amazon.com, which makes the navigation and layout instantly recognizable, and as a result, has helped to expedite user adoption."
Standard Life Bank was the first division of the wider Standard Life Group to implement Salesforce for Financial Services. Salesforce is being used to manage information for all of the Bank's intermediary relationships-a channel network of approximately 10,000 independent financial advisers. Salesforce provides a simple and secure web-based approach to managing these intermediary relationships that can be customized to meet the immediate needs of the Bank's sales teams, while also providing the means for future expansion. The Salesforce Platform has been used to customize its CRM application by providing the flexibility to adapt multiple fields, layouts, workflow and records to align with new sales models.
Other parts of the group are also developing Salesforce to meet their own particular needs. Standard Life Investments, Assurance and Healthcare are all at different deployment stages: the vision for the future being that every company within the group uses the same CRM system.