CapitalRock, LLC is focused on maximizing sales opportunities within a company’s customer base. CapitalRock was founded by a group of industry experts that have been building customer relationship and wealth management solutions for the financial services market for 25 years. The founders began using expert systems in the financial planning and wealth management arena in 1987, and over the years have applied various analytical and rules engines to the areas of online trading, compliance and suitability, real-time market data distribution, new account opening, and wealth management. CapitalRock was founded by John Hyde and Brian Hendricks in 2007. CapitalRock was formed to fill a market need that has not been fully met by CRM, financial planning or other wealth management platforms. Financial firms have spent the last 10 years building large data warehouses full of customer and product data on their clients. This information is not being fully leveraged to increase the “wallet share” or identify additional sales opportunities. CapitalRock is focused on maximizing sales opportunities within a company’s customer base.

CapitalRock did its first major deployment of the RightBRIDGE solution in 2009 with New York Life. The RightBRIDGE solution at New York Life is fully integrated with their data warehouse and processes data on over 6 million customers each week and is deployed to over 10,000 agents. The system has also been fully integrated into their agent portal that proactively presents RightBRIDGE opportunities to their agents when they log in each morning. RightBRIDGE has also been deployed at other major financial firms including Raymond James and Edward Jones.

The CapitalRock team is uniquely qualified to address the market need for sales intelligence or sales analytics in the financial services industry. Prior to starting CapitalRock John Hyde played a key role at Sterling Wentworth who was an early pioneer in financial planning software for both independent planners and larger financial firms. Sterling Wentworth grew into the largest supplier of financial planning software in the market with more than 200,000 licensed users of its needs analysis and financial planning software. Sterling Wentworth also successfully deployed a cross-selling solution at USAA. In 1999 John was made president of Sterling Wentworth the same year the company was sold to SunGard Data Systems. After joining SunGard John was promoted to Group CEO over front office brokerage systems and wealth management solutions for SunGard. Under John’s leadership the group developed the SunGard Wealth Station and SunGard Planning Station solution and other solutions now widely used in the industry. John also negotiated the acquisition of Frontier Analytics and the team integrated the Frontier Analytics allocations software into the WealthStation platform.

At SunGard in addition to focusing on financial planning a new development team was formed within John’s group to focus on compliance and suitability software . The team developed the SunGard Synapse Surveillance system and licensed the technology to companies such as AXA, Prudential, AIG, and many other firms. John led the acquisition of Protegent, another market leader in compliance software for financial services. By combining the two compliance offering SunGard quickly became the market leader in the brokerage surveillance space with more than a 100 broker dealers using the technology. Brian Hendricks, a CapitalRock founder, was a key member of the team that built SunGard compliance solutions.

With the combined background of financial planning and compliance John and Brian and their team set out to build a system that could analyze all the information that a firm has on their customers and make proactive needs-based suggestions. The end result was the development of the RightBRIDGE suggestion engine that identifies all relevant needs-based product opportunities for clients and prospects in a financial professional’s book of business. Not only does the RightBRIDGE engine find the most compelling product opportunities it also presents them with detailed reason text explaining why each suggestion is relevant.

One of the things that John learned while developing financial planning software was that financial planning software required a large fact-finding process in order to do a comprehensive financial plan. This limited the use of financial planning software because of the time consuming process of doing the fact-finding and putting together a financial plan. The initial requirements of the solution that the team set out to build was that it had to do its analyses based existing data, provide proactive suggestions, and explain the suggestions in plain English that an advisor could understand. The CapitalRock team set out to develop a system that would do as much analysis as possible based on information that was currently available in a firm’s CRM and data warehouse systems. In addition the team developed a solution that proactively presents suggestions to advisors and producers without entering data, or running any queries or reports. Many RightBRIDGE customers call RightBRIDGE an incremental planning tool in that it identifies and analyzed a client’s highest priority needs. With a background in suitability and surveillance the team also knew how to present opportunities and suggestions based on standard industry compliance requirements.

The founders also pioneered the development of a component-based architecture called the Common Services Architecture (CSA) that is now widely used as a common technology platform across SunGard Data Systems.