Invest Blue keeps clients at the centre of its fast-growing business

Invest Blue’s vision is to be Australia’s trusted home of great advice. The financial advice business was established over 20 years ago in a single office in Armidale, New South Wales, and has since expanded to nearly 50 locations nationwide.

Unify systems and data to better understand clients and enhance service delivery.

As Invest Blue continued to grow its national footprint, it wanted to put clients at the centre of all its services, including insurance, wealth protection, lending, aged-care, and accounting. To achieve this goal, the business needed a technology platform that could provide a comprehensive, 360-degree view of the client, regardless of which adviser or team was assisting them.

While Invest Blue had used Salesforce in the past, the platform was managed by the business’ financial advice licensee. Invest Blue wanted greater flexibility to tailor the platform and workflows to its own business needs and to integrate with the tools and platforms advisers used daily. Invest Blue also needed a better way to unify and harmonise data from across its businesses and services.

Transforming workflow was also essential to attracting talent and increasing adviser capacity. With a goal to establish a presence in every regional Australian town with a population of over 50,000, Invest Blue needed to address the scarcity of financial advisers created in the wake of the Royal Commission.

Compounding these challenges, Invest Blue had only six months to implement a change before losing access to its previous platform.

Financial Services Cloud centralises tools and information to power a more holistic and personalised advice experience.

Invest Blue now runs its retail advice business on Financial Services Cloud, providing a  complete view of clients’ financial plans and goals, so advisers can better understand and meet their needs. Advisers also collaborate with mortgage brokers and other service providers to provide more holistic financial solutions.

Financial Services Cloud integrates with Xplan financial planning software and Lumiant client experience software, centralising the tools and information used to service clients. This streamlines end-to-end workflows and boosts adviser productivity, contributing to a 25% increase in the targeted completion of client meetings within six months following implementation.

Invest Blue plans to extend the use of Financial Services Cloud across its business, similarly streamlining service delivery for its private wealth and lending clients. With this extended deployment, Invest Blue is also laying the groundwork for smarter, more efficient advice enabled by AI.

Invest Blue is in the process of reviewing its end-to-end processes, which will identify opportunities to augment teams and boost productivity using Agentforce. The business views the adoption of AI and automation as imperative for streamlining administrative work and increasing advisers’ capacity to spend more time with clients. It is also  considering quick efficiency wins, such as using Agentforce to help advisers prepare for client meetings. Another potential use case for Agentforce is to gain a better understanding of adviser and client interactions. This could facilitate the design of what an ideal advice experience looks like, providing a framework for Agentforce-powered feedback and coaching.

Having clean, accurate, and unified data will help the business to act on these opportunities.

“If we are confident in our data, there’s no reason why we can’t start to increase our use of AI and automation—particularly in areas that require a lot of manual intervention and carry risk of human error,” said Lexi Glover, Head of Strategic Execution, Invest Blue.

Data Cloud and Tableau power faster, more efficient revenue reporting.

With Invest Blue’s continued growth, it needed a more efficient way to manage revenue reporting and to be able to map revenue back to specific clients and services. Data Cloud and Tableau have filled this need, reducing manual effort and enabling the hourly refresh of reports as opposed to the daily reporting the business had previously. There’s also greater confidence and trust in the data reported.

Data Cloud extracts transactional revenue data from spreadsheets and harmonises the data, mapping it back to specific clients and agreements within Financial Services Cloud. The data then feeds into operational dashboards and reports in Tableau, which helps management and teams to visualise and explore data surrounding revenue, client acquisition, and retention.

Additional Tableau dashboards enable the business to track adviser progress and performance, as well as better monitor and manage risks.

Invest Blue plans to leverage Data Cloud and Tableau for additional insights and use cases in the future. These include audience segmentation, which, combined with Marketing Cloud, will enable more personalised client communication.

“One of the benefits of Data Cloud is that it allows us to pull data from so many different sources, which is essential as we continue to acquire and work with practices that are outside of our core technology ecosystem,” said Glover.

Invest Blue partnered with GBST WealthConnect, an AppExchange partner, to accelerate its deployment. Leveraging their expertise in the Australian financial services market and structured workflows, Invest Blue was able to quickly deploy a solution to support the delivery of compliant advice.

"WealthConnect really understood our needs and took the time to understand where we were unique, ultimately providing us with a flexible framework and structure to streamline our workflow,” said David Gill, Head of Analytics & Innovation, Invest Blue.

Invest Blue also partnered with 8Squad for project management and development resources. This collaborative approach enabled the business to go live on time and under budget.

Invest Blue’s change management approach was critical to its success, focusing on gathering stakeholder insights and fostering a culture of participation. For example, Invest Blue had change champions who represented different roles and geographic locations. This group conducted user acceptance testing and provided feedback throughout the 18-week development period. In addition, 86% of the team completed their training before go-live, and employee engagement and productivity remained high even during the rapid change.

Salesforce has provided Invest Blue with a complete solution to unlock its data and enable more personalised client experiences and holistic advice.

With a single source of truth for client, revenue, and operational data, Invest Blue can streamline end-to-end processes, better manage risk, and provide advisers with the data-driven insights they need to deliver exceptional service. Data is secure and protected with features like Privacy Centre and Salesforce Backup, helping Invest Blue manage compliance requirements.

The deployment of Financial Services Cloud and Data Cloud has also paved the way for the future of advice delivery, including AI-powered efficiencies, which Invest Blue sees as crucial to increasing adviser capacity and delivering a richer experience for clients.