CRM vendor Salesforce.com (News - Alert) today announced that Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services membership organization, is standardizing on Salesforce for Wealth Management.

 

The company says it’s deploying Salesforce for Wealth Management and will use the Force.com Platform and the Force.com AppExchange to build custom applications designed to “improve client engagement as well as the productivity of financial representatives,” according to Thrivent officials.

 

Thrivent Financial is one of the 43,600 companies comprising the Salesforce.com customer base as of April 30.

 

Betsy Ordal, vice president of field development at Thrivent, said Salesforce was chosen for its “rich functionality, delivery model and for the positive reviews we heard from other firms.”

 

The organization is using the Force.com Platform to customize the product and integrate it with existing applications, including its corporate e-mail system. Thrivent Financial is also using Force.com AppExchange applications.

 

Earlier this month Salesforce.com announced that “one of the ten largest commercial bank holding companies in the U.S.” has standardized on Salesforce for Financial Services.

 

The organization “realized a complete return on its investment in four months,” according to Salesforce.com officials, and according to a commissioned TEI study conducted by Forrester (News - Alert) Consulting on behalf of Salesforce.com, “is projected to achieve a 177 percent return on investment over three years.”

 

Before Salesforce, the commercial bank holding company had two legacy systems that were used to capture, store, track and analyze customer and vendor information. Because information was stored in disparate locations, the company often struggled with duplicate or inaccurate data, gaining access to information was “a manual and time-consuming process,” bank officials said.

 

The bank holding company deployed Salesforce for Financial Services, and then used Force.com to integrate the legacy systems and customize its new product for the company’s 1,300 Salesforce users.

 

According to the Forrester Consulting study, both “the organization’s chief information officer and the senior vice president of the Commercial Banking division ... described the most significant benefit of Salesforce as allowing salespersons, relationship managers, and product specialists to make more effective use of their time spent on routine sales, contact tracking and reporting activities.”

 

Forrester analyzed the time savings as well as other benefits using its Total Economic Impact methodology, and projects the company will reap annual savings of nearly $2.9 million.