As Published In Profit's Special Eddition for Financial Services

AGF sees benefits from the merger of PeopleSoft and Oracle.

Anytime two large companies merge, it can give their respective customers pause. Stephen Elioff, senior vice president of customer relationship management (CRM) for Toronto, Canada-based AGF Management, says he was initially nervous when he heard about the Oracle/PeopleSoft merger but quickly breathed a sigh of relief. He's seeing encouraging signs that the merging of the two companies will be good for AGF Management, and he's hopeful about the future.

All Together Now

Several years ago, AGF Management, which sells mutual funds via third-party distributors—stockbrokers, financial planners, and insurance agents— was evaluating CRM providers. The company wanted to improve productivity and customer service by trimming the time to resolution for customer inquiries. Although AGF had CRM applications in place, they were proprietary and the information was siloed, so customers often had to navigate AGF Management's internal business units on their own to find the right support. Elioff wanted something that would tie all of the company's divisions and its 1,500 employees—800 of whom would use the CRM program—together under one technology umbrella.

"Sales in our business are highly concentrated among a fairly small group of distributors, or advisors, as we call them," says Elioff. "What complicates things for us is that the turnover within that group of advisors from the beginning of the year until the end of the year is significant. In fact, even within the best of our sales territories, when the markets are in our favor, we experience turnover of more than 50 percent. This makes it critical for us to know who is selling our product, who is slowing down, and who is likely to speed up, so we can align our resources—our relationship managers and our solutions—with this key core group."

PeopleSoft by a Nose

After months of research, AGF Management narrowed the choices to two: Oracle and PeopleSoft. Both, says Elioff, were strong contenders. Both products, he says, would have enabled the company to better serve its customers. In the end, PeopleSoft won out, but only by a hair.

"PeopleSoft and Oracle—what they had going for them was flexibility within platforms," explains Elioff. "The two choices for us were very close; you couldn't get a piece of paper between them."

Scoping Out the Future

PeopleSoft's CRM products joined a list of ERP and back-end software that, one could say, complements the merger announcement. Everything in AGF Management's IT portfolio comes from either Oracle or PeopleSoft. The company runs PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, Oracle Database, Oracle Human Resources, and Oracle Financials.

Still, when Oracle made its announcement, Elioff had some concerns. "We had established a fairly significant relationship with people at PeopleSoft. In particular, we had made inroads into the product advisory council. We were one of a very small group of people in the CRM area who had direct input into the product direction that the organization was taking, and we actually had seen quite a few of our suggestions make their way into the products and into beta versions of the products," he says. "So you move on to Oracle, which is a much larger organization and certainly, by reputation, has a different corporate culture."

Elioff also wondered what would happen to his company's financial investment. The AGF Management CRM installation is only a few years old; the first PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal launched in December 2002. If Oracle had retired the PeopleSoft CRM program, AGF would have to start from scratch, which would put it at a significant disadvantage. All the benefits and efficiencies his customers enjoy would be wiped out.

These worries, says Elioff, turned out to be completely unfounded. In keeping with Oracle's commitment to maintain more than 90 percent of PeopleSoft's support and development staff, nearly all of the account directors and service staff members with whom Elioff worked remain within the merged companies. In a true commitment to customer satisfaction, Oracle made a decision to use PeopleSoft's CRM software as a lead in the financial services industry.

"That gave us a very strong sense of 'Look, our platform is secure,' and that made us feel a lot more excited about where the product is going," Elioff says.

With Open Arms

Once Elioff realized that his product implementation was secure, he started looking at the additional benefits the combined companies could bring AGF. There are many, he says. Because AGF Management's industry is a mature one, Elioff states, getting the most out of the company's existing customers is imperative. "Growth for us is pretty much the same as it is for a lot of other industries," he says. "It's dependent on consumers who have limited resources available to put toward their savings. So we're much more like the packaged goods or beer business, where market share, which in our business is driven by share of wallet, becomes the overall determining factor."

Spotlight AGF Management www.agf.com AGF Management is a publicly traded asset management firm dealing primarily in Canada, with a presence in Japan, Singapore, Ireland, England, and China. The company uses independent third parties for distribution of products and services. Location: Toronto, Canada Employees: 1,200 Annual revenue: C$650 million Oracle products: Oracle Database; Oracle E-Business Suite, including Financials and Human Resources PeopleSoft products: PeopleSoft Enterprise CRM Suite Version 8.4, including EPM Version 8.8 Other products and services: UNIX Platform, Sun Solaris, BearingPoint as the systems integrator for customer relationship management

That's where PeopleSoft's CRM software comes in. It lets Elioff observe advisor behavior in near-real time. Employees can use the software to determine when someone is likely to start or stop selling products. This allows AGF to allocate resources against specific opportunities.

"This means you're going to get there before the competition does, which will allow you to take that market share away," says Elioff. "That gives us an opportunity to be proactive about going after individuals. These are opportunities that, frankly, you don't normally see, because it's sort of a forest-and-tree situation. You're too close to the ground and to these individuals to catch these trends, and by the time you catch them, you've already overinvested time or money in an opportunity that really wasn't there."

No More Separation Anxiety

Elioff is happy with PeopleSoft's CRM, but the combination of CRM and Oracle's database and analytics, he says, will bring additional strength and depth to what he and his team are trying to do.

"Now that the database is owned by the same company, it allows the developers to take more advantage of some of the features in that database structure that will make the application that much stronger," says Elioff. "We're pretty excited about that and, similarly, the integration points between other ERP applications."

For example, AGF Management would like to bring human resources and financial information into its CRM application. Prior to the merger, this would have required custom development and some consulting with both companies' support staffs. Now, since Oracle has brought together PeopleSoft's support with its own, Elioff's IT and development staff have one point of contact for any questions or problems, so custom development will be easier.

For More Information LEARN more about the combined companies and capabilities at oracle.com/peoplesoft.

"For our IT group, the people who have to support these applications, it will be a tremendous improvement for them, and it should bring some cost efficiencies into play," he says. "To no longer have to support two separate application platforms, two separate languages, and the like—to be able to have that offering through one company, one organization—will be a huge benefit to them from a hiring and maintenance perspective."

On the application level, Elioff is excited about the unification of the PeopleSoft and Oracle developer teams. This, he says, will open up avenues that, separately, the two groups had never thought of. And as an end result, AGF Management's customers benefit.

"I know that most of the product groups, especially CRM, are really heads down, working toward what the fusion of the two products is going to look like," he says. "It allows us to make more-solid business decisions. If I can bring together financial information about my customers more cost-effectively, efficiently, and quickly and marry it with behavioral and value information about them, I can clearly determine what their needs are, figure out what their value is to my organization, and then make appropriate resource allocations to serve their needs."