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.